October 6, 2010

Goodreads, Facebook, and Shelfari

I committed to Shelfari quite awhile ago, but to be honest, have always found it cumbersome and slow. The bigger my bookshelf, the more slow and cumbersome. Up at Facebook I shared my Shelfari shelf through their app, and also used LivingSocial's Visual Bookshelf for all my reading, and WeRead for my Desert Isle Keepers, mostly because other friends used those apps and I wanted to stay connected. But when Facebook eliminated third party boxes and rendered their Boxes page useless, those apps lost their potency because I could not nearly as readily see other peoples' bookshelves, and more importantly, that Facebook had basically turned into the old AOL. Neither appealed to me in the least.

So earlier this week I set up my Goodreads page and imported my Shelfari shelf, then went through my blog and Amazon to add more books, and my PW reviews as sent via email to my editors to add even more. I'm still not entirely up to date, but I'm closer. Yesterday I changed my two star ratings into one star ratings and my three star ratings into two star ratings, and tomorrow will work on the fours into threes. I'm still figuring things out over there, and very few of my friends from Twitter and Facebook have found me, but perhaps that will change in future days and weeks. If not, oh well.

This morning I changed my profile on Shelfari to provide my Goodreads link and plan to delete all but my DIK's when I have time. As for Visual Bookshelf and WeRead, I haven't decided whether or not to delete them entirely; it wouldn't be hard to maintain my DIKs on WeRead, after all.

Slowly but surely I'm deleting most of the apps I once had boxes for on Facebook. My decision after that, since at this point I plan to use it primarily for birthdays, email, and keeping up with friends and family, is to defriend most people so that it doesn't take me an hour a day to scroll through updates in order to find the people I really care about. I'll be missing news for authors and artists and friends I used to play games with, but it'll make Facebook usable for me in a way it hasn't been for some time, particularly since I use it via my phone so often.

So I've got three choices...cut my losses and eliminate Visual Bookshelf and WeRead entirely, pick one and delete the other, or maintain them both as I plan to maintain my Shelfari shelf, with DIK reads only. Let me know what you think.


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2 comments:

Touch of Ink said...

I briefly dabbled with Shelfari a couple of months ago, but found it too unwieldy. I'm trying GoodReads, but what I really want is seamless links with my purchases. I guess Amazon needs to do something more social :)

Laurie Gold said...

Amazon owns Shelfari, which is one of the reasons I initially went with it.