Full Circle Associates

I wish I had read this before I began exploring Shelfari. Caught in Shelfari’s Sticky Web: No More Friends, Please! I should know better. I should be VERY careful of any site's "find a friend" feature, having been on the receiving end of such spam.

But I love books and I just got sucked in.

Shelfari's "find a friend" feature has an interface that is easy to misinterpret. I thought I was sending a mail only to the people in my gmail contact list that were already members. I did not scroll down and see it was to ALL 900+ contacts.

Red face. Egg on face.

But what is more interesting is how many of my contacts trusted me and registered. Within 24 hours I had notification that more than 80 of my contacts had joined the site. Two fell victim right away to the same error I made. Uh oh.

In addition, I made contact with 3 people I had lost touch with and had four gracious people write and ask "who are you and do we know each other?"

Social networks are very interesting, especially the edges of very weak connections.

In any case, I learned my lesson, yet again.

If you are looking for a web based bookshelf sharing/social networking application, I have explored three. Shelfari is at the bottom of my list. I far prefer http://www.goodreads.com and http://www.librarything.com I have been able to import my LibraryThing list (where I first started) into both other sites with ease. Here is a quickie review - totally off the cuff. Feel free to add your thoughts and observations!

LibraryThing
I started out months ago on Library thing and really liked it. Your book organizing area is a giant spread sheet so if you are a really organized person, this feels useful. You have lots of different ways to organize and use the data. (I'm not that organized, but still, it is nice!) There is a tag cloud, which is peachy. I love tags. From an "organizing my bookshelf" perspective, LibraryThing is my preference. From a social network perspective, it doesn't' make it as easy to connect with other friends and readers as...

GoodReads
LazyGal introduced me yesterday to Goodreads. I like Goodreads' ease of putting books into piles of read and to be read. This makes sense to me from the social learning aspect - people can see what I'm currently reading and what is on the stack. (My stack is frightening however, and I'm not sure I'd like to admit to it's height!)

I like the harder-to-spamness of Goodread's "friend finding" as well. Their notifications are well collected into a daily email to reduce Bacn. Their message inbox is simple and you can see both the messages you sent and received in one place. The interface is low key, the book images are not too big/overwhelming. So far, so good. I'd say this site is a good one for a network of people who want to interact around their books together.


Shelfari
The initial Shelfari page is inviting and warm. It makes it easy to find out what books you have in common with your friends (once you have spammed them). It focuses on this social aspect. The one aspect of this that is ironic is that their r message feature is odd in that you see messages to you on your page, but you have to go to the sending member's page to reply, so initial message/replies cannot be seen on one page. Disjointed!

The bookshelf, is hard to read and other friends have said it is not easy to figure out the interface. The book images are awfully large. There are few options for sorting and organizing your books. Not good for big book collections.

Shelfari is Bacn prone. Every action generates by default an alert email.

Bottom line?
I'll continue playing with LibraryThing and GoodReads. I can import and export my book lists between them, so when I settle in, I can carry all my work across. That's sweet!