Ravelry

To many, the practitioners of needlecrafts like knitting and crochet embody technological backwardness. By and large, knitters are stereotyped as old, female, grouchy, and, indeed, lonely – as though their craft fills the place of interpersonal relationships.

These assumptions are, of course, patently false. By way of proof I present Ravelry, a free, members-only, online information organization and social networking tool for the crafty among us. Designed by Jess (a knitter herself) and Casey Forbes, Ravelry is the new one-stop go-to resource for knitting tips, tricks, patterns, yarn information, reviews, and knitters themselves. Before its beta launch in May 2007, nothing like it existed. Sure, all the information collected in Ravelry by its over 100,000 users was floating around online, primarily on blogs – noted author and knitter Stephanie Pearl-McPhee claims that knitters are the largest community of users on Bloglines – but also on other personal webpages, yarn company sites, in video and audio tutorials, and free pattern repositories. But Forbes and Forbes have revolutionized how knitters use the internet.

Let’s take a look at how Ravelry works. Once a beta tester receives an invitation to participate, she can create a personal profile using a tool called “My Notebook." This profile is what other members (Ravelers) see when they search for someone by username. From here, users can link to their homepages, set up a feed to their blogs, display Ravelry groups to which they belong and knitting books that they own, and create photo-mosaics of their FOs (finished objects). Posting photos on Ravelry - a must if a user wants feedback or help with a project, or just to show off her work - requires a Flickr account. The site’s heavy photo content makes for very slow navigation, especially if you have an older computer or a slow connection, which is frustrating.

Navigating the information generated by other users is made simple and quick by the site’s tabbed toolbar. You can read a little more about the functionality of each tab in Ravelry’s Wikipedia entry, but here’s a visual of the tabs themselves:

Forbes and Forbes have enhanced Ravelry’s browsability by listing the most frequently tagged or otherwise identified yarns and patterns under the relevant tabs.

One final innovative feature of the site is the queue, a personalized “to do” list for each member. When a user sees a pattern she wants to follow up on, she has the option to add it to her queue for future use. Additionally, Forbes and Forbes have created a bookmarklet for one’s browser toolbar to enable users to drag-and-drop patterns from the web to their queues.

On the whole, knitters can’t sing Ravelry’s praises enough. Indeed, the constant improvement of the site based on users' feedback, in combinations with the creators' by-knitters, for-knitters philosophy, ensures a level of quality control that is hard to come by on regular, dedicated social-networking sites. Ravelry serves as a testament to the importance of users’ input in the design process at the same time that it proves the technological savvy of the community for whom it is designed.