Nerd Drama: LibraryThing Goes After Shelfari
Submitted by kingrat on Fri, 2007-11-09 07:15.On the official LibraryThing "ideas" blog, Thingology, LibraryThing goes to the mattress and attacks Shelfari: "We respect our competitors with one exception: the site 'Shelfari.com.'" Then they go on to explain why.
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These are certainly serious accusations but they warrant the reaction. No company that uses methods like these deserve respect and I think LT is doing the right thing.
Are many of you who use Wordsy also users at LibraryThing?
I have accounts on both LibraryThing and Shelfari. I'm still getting to know both sites. So far I'm not thrilled with Shelfari, but it's possible some it's simply growing pains. The biggest problems I see are all fixable, but I haven't been a member long enough to know if they're making progress.
Yes, Shelfari's sign-up procedure is deceptive. I've been spammed by them repeatedly when friends have been fooled by it. Even knowing what to expect, it almost fooled me too.
Shelfari's performance is slow and buggy. Assigning "stars" (ratings) to a book is frustrating (and sometimes impossible), and submitting reviews is buggy.
On almost all pages of Shelfari, books are displayed only by cover--no accompanying text (title, author, etc). Many of the covers are too blurry to see the book's title, and the hover text is often too short to display the full title (and doesn't always show up). It's pretty, but not informative.
Shelfari's blog widgets aren't very flexible, and take up a lot of extra space on the page.
We actually updated Shelfari last night to deal with this issue. Our small team has been slammed just trying to keep our site running recently. Tim pointed out some aspects of Shelfari that were definitely broken and we have now fixed it. We'll be blogging more details soon.
Josh
It surprises me that such a serious bug slips through to your live environment. You probably need to test your code better before integrating it into the live site. Tiny errors can make a huge difference. Something similar to this happened when I used StumbleUpon. In that case it was merely embarrassing, nothing more. But I still wrote an angry email about it. I hope they fixed it since.
Shelfari purportedly "fixed" their spam problems months ago when people began to complain. Months and thousands of spammed user sign-ups later, Shelfari is still "fixing" its interface. Dishonest BS from beginning to end.
The way I see it, Shelfari hoped to get away with it the last time because they thought they could. Now that renewed attention is being brought to bear on their sleaziness, they're belatedly trying to bluff and PR their way out of this again.
Not gonna work.
Jakob,
I just posted a detailed explanation of what the problem was on Shelfari and how we fixed it last week. The problem grew as we kept adding members, as you'll read.
http://shelfari.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/11/invitation-desi.html
Yup, just like SU. Extremely poor usability. You should have asked your used first "do you ever need to invite your 1000 contacts to Shelfari?" before deciding on such an implementation as this.
What makes this so embarrassing is that Gmail automatically adds anyone you correspond with to your address book, meaning you may email support departments (adding to their workload and annoying them), annoying your boss, losing your clients, contact your ex, even email dead people. It's gross and it makes people feel foolish. Your step on their self-respect, their pride and affect the way they're seen by others. It's hard to find a better way to make an enemy!
So, please for your own sake, hire a usability professional and think this through, *again*!
:-) damage control. I just read the whole thing. It seems odd that you wouldn't realize there is radically rising percentage of spam complaints. Also, I feel this only addresses some of the complaints stated over at librarything, not all of them.
Most important is that they'll stop this behaviour. If that can be done it was all worth it.
Shelfari, the Plaxo of the bookworld.
Thanks for the info! I am a member of Librarything, and I have received invitations from Shelfari from fellow authors (who probably never intended to send them). I'm glad I never joined.
Tricia Ares
Editor Modern Matriarch