Pompous Punditry Personified

This blog has been in existence for less than an hour and I’m already ready to rant against something. I have a feeling this won’t be my last.

I joined Shelfari a few weeks ago after giving up on iBook’s Facebook application. Shelfari’s beautifully designed destination site and book shelf widget drew me in and I quickly added about 75 books I’ve read to my shelf. Aside from being able to meet and argue — I mean, discuss — books with other readers, I thought it would be a great way to keep track of the books that I remember having read. 

Things went swimmingly until I started looking for groups to join. The most popular one had only about 5000 members. By my count, only 13 have more than 1000 members and the fifth most popular is called Friendship for Universal Peace. The name telegraphs to me that only a wacko could come up with a name like that. I can’t say for sure since it’s a private group. Anyway, I joined a couple groups and posted to one that I was interested in learning more about the genre and wondered which books I should start with to get a good overview of it. Twelve days later, none of the 30 other member have responded. And for clarification, this was not the non-responsive book group. It was disappointing.

I also found the site slow but was willing to overlook that since I still like keeping track of the books I’ve read on the Shelfari shelf that’s now displayed on my Facebook page. However, I doubt I’ll be visiting the site except when I finish a book to rack it up. I’m not the only one disappointed with Shelfari.

Today, I found another flaw with Shelfari when I tried to add my shelf to this blog’s sidebar. Because it includes an embed, it can’t be displayed on WordPress. A user in the WordPress forum said they contact Shelfari about this a while ago, but they still have not provided simple html code to use for the blog. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Shelfari’s blog is hosted by Typepad,

Someone must be do a better job nailing the online book group service. Maybe Amazon’s backing of Shelfari has hurt its teams motivation. Maybe these are hard problems to solve (at least the part about attracting more interested users. The part about the slow site and no WordPress widget is easy). I’d give LibraryThing a try, but its site is heinous. If a company can get this right, the reward should be rich for the one that does.