shelfari
October 13th, 2006 | Published in books, culture, news | 16 Comments
It seems that LibraryThing has a new rival: Shelfari.
Our first product, Shelfari, will enable our users to become part of a global community of book lovers to be empowered to share their taste in books with their peers. Shelfari enables people passionate about books to:
* Build virtual bookshelves to express themselves to their friends and to the world
* Discover books that are popular in their trusted circles of friends
* Influence peers by rating & discussing books online
* Discover and learn from other people with similar reading tastes
* Participate in online book groups to further explore literature
* Interact with and learn from authors
It’s all free, whereas LibraryThing charges for collections over 200. However, I really don’t like that they call Shelfari a product. The LibraryThing community was started by one book-loving guy, and Tim is someone you can email and even meet in person. Shelfari has a stand-offish feel to me. Plus, it annoys me when companies make claims that are just flat-out wrong:
“Just as Flickr was social media around photos or YouTube around videos or Digg around news, we are building the first social media site focused on people that read books,” said Hug, who, before founding Shelfari, served as director of device engineering at RealNetworks.
The first? Please. Anyway, I don’t have an account and doubt I’ll get one. Why bother when I’m already subscribed to the cooler LibraryThing?
February 25th, 2007at 4:52 am(#)
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October 14th, 2006at 2:40 pm(#)
Hey. Thanks for the support, and particularly for catching them on that bit about being first. As you can imagine, it drove me crazy when I saw it–and that they had a PR first sending it out to newspapers around the country. They don’t have half the social features LibraryThing has, and LibraryThing has 21 competitors already, and–depending on how you define it–wasn’t necessarily the first either.
If you ever get an account–and import your LibraryThing catalog–you’ll find they don’t do as much. You can’t see your books in a list. You can’t edit your book data. No author pages. No tag pages. No personal tag clouds, author clouds, book statistics. No searching of foreign Amazons and no libraries at all. No groups. No forums, etc. It’s a way to create a list of pointers to Amazon records. Transformative!
No need to publish my venting! Tim
October 14th, 2006at 8:06 pm(#)
I checked it out and would recommend listall.com before shelfari.
I’ve been hoping for some competiton for LibraryThing for quite some time (many aspects of LT leave me cold), but shelfari isn’t it.
October 16th, 2006at 7:10 am(#)
Excellent points, Tim! The other thing about LibraryThing is that it was primarily pushed by word-of-mouth (or at least that’s how I heard about it). Though I don’t subscribe to the thinking that “X number of people can’t be wrong,” I do take notice when something new seems to be on everyone’s lips. People are still buzzing about LibraryThing, whereas it seems that Shelfari’s main impetus is via local publicity. It might spread beyond that, but I’m confident that it won’t reach the level of LibraryThing. And as you pointed out somewhere, they’re not going to make the money they thought they would from Amazon. It may end up a failed venture.
October 16th, 2006at 7:12 am(#)
Thanks for your comment, Austin! I tried checking out listall.com, but it was just a login page with no information. What’s the deal with that?
What is it about LibraryThing that you don’t like? Tim’s always open to suggestions.
October 16th, 2006at 12:12 pm(#)
Whoops, I meant http://www.listal.com/ Too many “l’s”!
I guess I’m not interested in a social cataloging tool, but an organizational tool. I need to look at LT again… when I first joined long ago I was hoping for a tool that would let me specify where the books were in my house, and let me check them out to friends.
October 17th, 2006at 12:01 am(#)
Honestly, I’m not big on the social aspect of LibraryThing either. I spent so much time 10 years ago with IM and chat rooms that I think I permanently burned myself out on that sort of thing. Plus, my friends call me a closet librarian, so organization certainly is my #1 goal. I’m very happy with LT, though I rarely lend my books out (you’ve got to be part of the inner circle for that). I would suggest taking another look at LT. I use the tags for categorization, but you could easily adjust tags to show what is on loan and where the books are located. It would make that quite simple, actually. To see which books are where or which are lent out, all you’d have to do is click on the particular tag.
October 17th, 2006at 12:02 am(#)
Another comment from Tim (via email):
Yeah. LibraryThing’s proven that web aps. don’t need PR. We’ve never
done a press release or hired a PR firm. We haven’t even advertised,
except for two weeks with Google Adsense that was a pain. Shelfari
started with a PR firm and a press release (the one proclaiming them
the first). This got them some short-term pess, and scared me, but, a
few days later, it looks like we’re still right about how things
spread these days.
Ah well, thanks for letting me vent again
Take care, Tim
October 17th, 2006at 9:17 am(#)
LibraryThing tends to use tags for things like where something is in your house. Tags have a flexibility that dedicated fields can’t. Check-in/out, can also be done with tags, but enough people want it as a “real” feature that we’re going to release it as such.
Part of the fun of LibraryThing’s “social networking” is that, since connections are by books, not friends, you can partake of it entirely passively–use recommendations, browse reviews, etc. without ever talking to someone
Listal’s pretty good. It suffers the usual Amazon-only problem, but it’s not a hack job like most of the 20 competitors.
October 17th, 2006at 12:21 pm(#)
Wowzer! You’re Tim as in LibraryThing Tim.
Thanks for your response. I guess I’m a LibraryThing fan, now. =)
October 22nd, 2006at 2:25 pm(#)
theorist
thanks for your comments on my entry. Sorry I hadn’t checked this blog entry prior to mine as you bring up points I’d not considered.
October 27th, 2006at 6:37 pm(#)
GuruLib has the ability to catalog books in shelfs. Just like you keep them in your home. Also GuruLib can help you keep track of your borrowed items.
May 31st, 2007at 6:26 pm(#)
[...] Shelfari, and GuruLib—at librarytwopointzero, and the theorist has blogged about the relative merits of Shelfari versus LibraryThing. While Shelfari consistently earns points for aesthetics, opinion seems to be running strongly in [...]
October 4th, 2007at 1:01 am(#)
[...] how did I learn more about Shelfari? I read a few blog posts (here and here – both a year old, neither seemed particularly impressed with the site). And then I visited the [...]
April 7th, 2008at 2:07 pm(#)
LibraryThing has great reviews, but I find the UI incredibly badly designed. And at least so far, I don’t have a solution from the other companies out there to offer. But I’m trying them out to see which one fits.
How do the others feel about the UI design of LT? I can’t seem to find most things unless I really dig them out. And if I try it again a day later, I can’t recall how I’d gotten to it. And yet, blogs seem to give it a thumbs it. I’m stumped.
April 29th, 2008at 6:06 am(#)
LT is not perfect. But there’s something about their operations and the folks behind the scenes that makes it very appealing.