[GMG-Devel] Reimagining "favorites" as "collections"

[Aaron Williamson]

Hey goblins,

After dinner with Chris last night, I decided to dig back into the "Favorites"
feature I left dormant some time ago (http://issues.mediagoblin.org/ticket/277).
In our initial discussion of this feature, we went back and forth about whether
we wanted "favorites" or "likes" or "hearts" or "plus ones," etc. and we sort of
half-heartedly chose favorites because, well, it's not Facebook-y.

We also talked at the time about making "favorites" just a special case
"collection" or "gallery," but decided against it partly to get favorites out
the door (d'oh). But I still like the idea of merging these two concepts, and I
think we can make them more than the sum of their parts, without adding a ton of
extra work.

The model I have in mind is similar to (I know, I know) Pinterest's "pinning" --
rather than "favoriting" things or creating galleries, you'd collect media that
you like. Could be yours, could be others', could be a combination of both. And,
like on Pinterest, you have the option to add a comment to everything you
collect, so that in addition to the poster's description, you can tell people
*why* you put a given image/video/etc. into a particular collection.

Maybe we make "favorites" a special, pre-defined case of "collections" or maybe
we let people name all of their collections whatever they want. But I think this
adds interaction to the "favoriting"/"collecting" feature that could be a lot of
fun and maybe really useful.

What do you think?

Aaron