Shelfari vs. LibraryThing
I was pleased to notice that Shelfari has shot past LibraryThing (according to Alexa anyway). I was always put off LibraryThing because there was a fee if you entered more than 200 books, which doesn't exactly encourage you to get involved in the community....and its especially annoying as most of the site's value comes from the members who put in the most effort!
I have taken to supporting web sites rather sports teams in reaction to the sad demise of Norwich City F.C.
Labels: LibraryThing, Shelfari
19 Comments:
They haven't really. It's their spam campaign; Alexa catches that very well. Actual user activity is much lower.
http://gawker.com/news/the-internet-sucks/-314436.php
A hundred other such references available.
28 October 2007 at 01:21
Oh, and check out the Alexa data on countries:
Iran - 25.9%
India - 22.8%
United States - 14.5%
Philippines - 8.8%
I hope you enjoy talking to Iranians!
28 October 2007 at 01:24
@tim- Whilst appreciating the problems of Alexa your "I hope you enjoy talking to Iranians" comment shows that I chose the right social network.
28 October 2007 at 08:49
I think Tim was just being humorous.
But I think you miss the point, which is: LibraryThing is about love! That's what makes it awesome. Shelfari, on the other hand, is smarmy, commercial, and generally spammy. I've always thought of the difference between LT and Shelfari as between users who really love books (LT) and between users who really love myspace-style social networking (ugh).
One has deep functionality (LT), the other is shallow (Shelfari) with just enough of a patina of catalogging function to pretend that it is really about books.
One is propelled by passionately held ideas like 'the long tail' and new modes of data categorisation (LT), the other is driven by commercial hype rather than the passion of ideas.
When I first found LT and found that a lifetime membership was little more than a tenner, I didn't even think twice. It costs less than watching Delia Smith parading around at half-time for Putin's sake!
Da, my friend, that's what I think about the unfortunate Naarrrrch FC.
But back to LibraryThing. I don't have any data to back me up, but it appears - at least to me - to be far more busy than Shelfari. Always the bustle of new projects, new developments, new tweaks, new improvements coming up. Lots of user input and involved user input at that. Lots of general talk even away from books. It's like a communal library with a passionate and informed user base.
I know f-all about web 2.0, but if it's anything dependant on users at all, I think there's a clear winner here.
If you asked me, Shelfari will go down like a sack o' shit for being so overtly commercial and passionless. But that's just the oligarch in me speaking. Da!
28 October 2007 at 13:32
Da, it's me again. I should add that you couldn't be more mistaken that you "chose the right social network" because of umbrage taken at a joke (at least I think it was a joke!).
But no, really, that Shelfari is evil is indubitable: they spam and sneakily take over your email account for spamming purposes when you sign up. Watch for it, and read the very, very small print.
LT, whose proprietor makes the off-colour joke now and then, really isn't evil by any stretch of the imagination. Tim's jocularity is well known to users of LT and his involvement with his user base is commendable.
Shelfari, however, are the scum of the internets, da! You couldn't choose a more nakedly evil and shallowly commercial-driven project with £$-signs in its eyes to cast your lot in with. Sure, it might be free, but does it "keep it real"? The answer is, Nyet!
By contrast, a tenner (for life!) to keep Tim's homespun operation going is going to buy you more value than say, the three used books you could have bought with it, or that beer and a curry after another disappointing day at Carrow Road, or this month's quota of lad mags. Da, my friend, even Putin agrees!
28 October 2007 at 13:50
Da, 'tis me. This time, I'm back with some data. I don't have access to LibraryThing's internal data, but I did some googling and the results are revealing.
I typed "librarything" into google, and it returned almost 4.5 million results (4,480,000). I did the same with "shelfari", and it returned far fewer at 940,000.
So popularity-wise, Shelfari has a lot of catching up to do (which probably explains why they resort to spam - desperation).
I then tried this experiment on "shelfari sucks", and "librarything sucks" to gauge the level of suckitude for either website.
Da, I'm not surprised - "shelfari sucks" returned 91 results, with the first result being:
"Shelfari SUCKS, the evil spamming bastiches"
To be fair, that number is a tad inflated because multiple websites have linked to that particular post. But nevertheless, their spamminess is a well-observed phenomenon.
On the other hand, "librarything sucks" returned all of 1 result, which on closer inspection reads:
"LibraryThing sucks your soul...in a good way"
Da, the google has spoken.
28 October 2007 at 16:34
@RA- if LT is selling this 'love' that it is all about, doesn't that make it a cheap prostitute? Personally I dislike having to pay for a service where most of the value comes from the users' interactions, especially as it will necessarily price certain users out of the market.
Whilst appreciating tim's second comment may have been an attempt at humour, its more racist than funny, and that is not a balance people should really want to get wrong.
28 October 2007 at 18:21
Well David, no one is forcing you to join LT. Rather, the point was that LT users like me appreciate the service enough to pay for it without even having to think twice about it(and I'm sure most book lovers understand what I mean).
£10 (US$25 or thereabouts) for a lifetime service really isn't a lot. And I doubt anyone is being "priced out" seeing as that is little more than the price of a new book!
So basically, if you can't afford a new book (or three second-hand books), then I'm not sure what you're even doing on LT - you're unlikely to have very many books to catalog anyway. Right?
(That's why it's free for the cataloggers with less than 200 books - if you haven't the means to assemble a large library, presumably you haven't the means to spare for an LT membership. So you get to catalog up to 200 books free. To me, it makes sense.)
You're also missing the point when you say that "most" of the value comes from customers' interactions. While users DO populate LibraryThing with data, it is the very framework of LibraryThing - its algorithms, its catalogging functions, its data aggregating functions - that make the data _meaningful_. Without that aggregating framework, your library might as well be an isolated one in the ether.
Take it from this user who 'gets it' and is willing to pay for a service largely funded by its users (no ads). If you ask me, the idea that everything on the internet _should_ be free is a dogma and an excuse for a sense of entitlement.
So with respect, I think you're missing the point. As for Tim's attempt at humour, really, how you can construe that as "racist" is beyond me. If a website has a mostly French or Flemish or Korean or Chinese-speaking user base, I'd probably say the same thing on the assumption that you're part of the English-speaking internet. It doesn't mean I'm being racist towards the Flemish. (And I'm Chinese myself.)
So in conclusion, I think the fact that I - as a user and member of LibraryThing - am here willing to spend my own time advocating for LT (and for free!), is itself evidence that "love" for what LibraryThing is doing goes beyond being a mere paying "customer". Rather, I view myself as a member of a book-minded community doing the decent thing and defraying the costs of running this very huge bookclub.
That's something the web 2.0 junkies might want to consider.
28 October 2007 at 19:53
Hey again. Obviously I have nothing against Iranians, and to call the comment racist is absurd. (Check out LT and you'll see I have an extensive middle-eastern book collection and although I don't speak Persian, I do Turkish. Indeed, I lived in that part of the world for a while and nearly *married* a Pakistani! But whatever. Text doesn't convey tone very well, I suppose.)
I do have a point, though. Do you really want to be on a social network primarily filled with Iranians? I'm guessing you're on MySpace, Bebo or Facebook, not Orkut, right? Orkut is a very active community, but it's also mostly Brazilians and, to a lesser extent, Iranians now. That can feel a little alienating. Indeed, in Orkut's case the Brazilian tilt got stronger and stronger as non-Brazilians felt increasingly marginalized.
Anyway, the huge numbers of Iranians, Indians and Filipinos on Shelfari is probably a sampling error anyway. Alexa is smoke on smoke. Koreans are another Alexa favorite; a site will suddenly shoot up because it does something of interest to them, and Koreans have the Alexa toolbar much more than other nationalities. It just points out the whole absurdity of the thing. In LT's case, the Alexa numbers show we have the same traffic we had after a few weeks of being open two years ago. That's completely wrong--off by an order of magnitude. It happens because Alexa captures a certain sort of person. When you get right down to it, most book people aren't likely to have the Alexa toolbar.
Notably, LibraryThing publishes extensive data about site activity--numbers of users, books, etc. Shelfari never has. Modesty is an unlikely explanation.
Two more points about internationalization.
1. LibraryThing draws on Amazon as well as 80+ libraries around the world. We don't draw from any Iranian libraries, but we have quite a few outside the US, and many with extensive Persian collections. Shelfari links to exactly one source, Amazon. Amazon does not stock Persian books.
2. LibraryThing is available in more than a dozen languages, from French and Danish to Turkish and Portuguese. Heck, try our Welsh version, cym.librarything.com. Shelfari is monolingual.
"@RA- if LT is selling this 'love' that it is all about, doesn't that make it a cheap prostitute? Personally I dislike having to pay for a service where most of the value comes from the users' interactions, especially as it will necessarily price certain users out of the market."
Well, you're paying one way or another. In Shelfari's case you're paying through advertising and because Shelfari can sell your data. LibraryThing also can sell your data, but we release much of it under public domain or CC licenses. We also have strict terms around it. For example, you can decide if your reviews ever leave or not, and we only claim a license. The Shelfari releases nothing publically and their terms claim actual *copyright* over your tags and reviews!
Lastly you're paying because both sites get money when you buy from Amazon. But, unlike Shelfari, LibraryThing lists many other booksellers as well as libraries and swap sites. We don't make money on most of them, but we know members don't always want to buy from Amazon.
So, I probably should have programmed instead of writing this. Send me your email, however, and I'll send you a handful of free accounts for all the time this took to read!
28 October 2007 at 23:39
Whilst $25 may not be a barrier to someone in the west on a decent wage, it can nonetheless be a barrier to some. Even if a person can afford the cost (which not everyone can) it will still be a barrier to those who may not have the required bank account, or are not confident enough of e-commerce to subscribe. Money will always be a barrier and personally I would prefer a site to utilise adverts so it can be as inclusive as possible.
Rather than saying the comment was racist, I said it was more racist than funny, and it is. Country of origin is less of an issue in a social network for books than in the more general social networks such as Facebook etc, and therefore mention of country of origin is really just appealing to the xenophobe in all of us. I utilise Facebook (occassionally) to keep up to date with my friends, therefore it is important I use the network that most of my friends (who are mostly in the same geographic region) are on. I use Shelfari to talk about books, therefore it is irrelevant where people are from, especially as you point out, Shelfari is monolingual. Tone is not conveyed well in text, and so we should be careful when putting something that sounds entirely reasonable in our heads into a blog.
I am well aware of the Alexa limitations, it was just interesting to notice that Shelfari had passed LibraryThing. Whilst I am sure that there are limitations with Shelfari, the public library spirit in me will continue to hope it is more successful than LibraryThing whilst it is free and LibraryThing isn't.
Thanks for the offer of a free account (I read at least the last line), but I will stick with the free-for-all Shelfari...and as for your programming may I recommend working on your Facebook application...
29 October 2007 at 09:16
That evades the original point though: that if you're able to afford an internet connection, a computer, and more than 200 books, you're likely to be able to afford membership for the price of a book.
'Inclusiveness' is not a virtue in and of itself. A book cataloging site attracts a specific demographic - book lovers with book collections. The logic is that there will be few barriers to entry (price of a book) for people with sufficiently large libraries seeing as they will be people of means anyway.
Where it is warranted (people who haven't the means and less than 200 books), LibraryThing is free to use. So the price differentiation here makes the barriers to entry very few indeed, so it is not strictly true that LT costs anything to use.
As a member who enjoys using an ad-free site, I hope Tim never goes the tacky ad-route.
As for "more racist than funny" - you couldn't make it up. That's like saying someone is "more [insert racial epithet] than Caucasian".
Just because something isn't funny doesn't make it racist, any more than the fact that I'm not Caucasian makes your epithet of choice apposite. Your argument is an odd one. And hyperbolic 'racist' accusations are an oddly effective means of shutting down discussion.
As regards country of origin - I'm not going to get very much utility from a social network populated mostly with Farsi books when my own books are in English and Mandarin now, am I? Or Flemish books for that matter. Or Danish books. Does that make me a "xenophobe"?
You just haven't thought this through very much, David.
Your comment about public libraries and Shelfari was particularly ironic, given that one of LT's largest core user groups are librarians!
I think this little factoid suggests that you've got this precisely reversed, and should look deeper beyond the 'it's free! yum!' dogma. But hey, I'm just a user, you're the web 2.0 expert.
29 October 2007 at 14:13
Or to put it another way, I'm going to get more social utility from a social network whose critical mass of books are in English. If the critical mass is of Belgians, then I'm likely to be seeing a lot of Flemish books instead of English ones.
Nationality, therefore, is a proxy for what kinds of books I'm going to see.
That I prefer NOT to use a mainly Belgian website given that my own books are in English doesn't mean that I'm being a xenophobe or - as you put it - "racist".
Again, you have very odd ideas about the internet. Surely as a 'research fellow' on the intarwebs you can perceive how social networks, you know, actually work.
Back to the dacha for me, da.
29 October 2007 at 14:24
@RA As much as I appreciate your comments I do find that I greet them wearily. Exhausted at the constant too-ing and fro-ing of what I consider to be a simple stand point...or rather two stand points.
1)I prefer a free at point-of-use site that is open to all.
On this point we have an insurmountable difference of opinion. I don't see acces to books and the internet as a sign that you can afford to pay $25 to join a social netwroking group, you do.
2)I think comments such as "I hope you enjoy talking to Iranians" may have been better thought out.
The percentages give no indication as to whether or not the network reaches the critical mass of people who are able to discuss a certain sub-set of books which I have read. There may only be 1% of English speakers/readers on the network, but that 1% may be enough to mean the network has reached necessary number of users. Comments such as "I hope you enjoy talking to Iranians" therefore appeals to a baser instinct. As already discussed, text does not always deliver the appropriate tone of voice.
29 October 2007 at 15:45
That may be because I have the better argument?
On (1), you assert as a matter of principle that free = good. I've argued to the contrary that this is dogma, and gave reasons why. (You do not dispute these reasons but simply reassert that it is so.)
On (2), your gloss on Tim's comment is not only unreasonable, but uncharitable.
1% x 2.5 million (roughly the number of unique works on LT) = 25,000 unique works in English.
Assuming a library size of 200 on average, 1% works out to about 125 users relevant to your language. Some critical mass there.
Even assuming a hypothetical non-English book site that is as big as LT, it would need to expand a hundred-fold to equal the critical mass in English books that LT offers.
I think it's obvious why someone who reads English books will prefer the user-base that gives him the greater social utility.
To suggest that this is "racist" is stretching it. Be reasonable.
Ta.
29 October 2007 at 19:25
It ain't over till the anime cat set people chime in.
6 November 2007 at 05:14
I was banned from Shelfari for politely disagreeing about the historical accuracy of “The Book of Mormon”. They were mad that I pointed out flaws in its history and so they contacted an admin, Amanda, and she banned me just because they had the majority. She said my comments were inflammatory but they were much more polite than what was being written to and about me.
24 November 2008 at 23:26
Non-Westerners who can't afford the $25 fee probably can't afford enough books to reach the 200 mark anyway.
N.B. this is not economic prejudice.
I use three sites. Shelfari and bookarmy
Both are free (bookarmy definitely).
11 May 2009 at 14:57
I present myself as an example of the above statement. I am a student of Engineering from India.
If I make a list of English fiction I've read, it would easily cross five-hundred books (may be even a thousand). So I have the reason and the interest to have an account on such a website.
However, most of the books I've read were issued from libraries, borrowed from friends or purchased from scrap-pedlars for peanuts. (I know that's not exactly legal, but it helps me find some rare stuff, and it allows me to read as much as I want to). Most fresh books in stores cost the equivalent of around $5-10 here.
Also, the internet I'm using is provided free to me by my university.
The point is, I find $25 prohibitive. Even if it were $10, I would find it very inconvenient to make a payment online. Even if I could convince my suspicious dad that it was something genuine I needed to pay for (in order to ask him for his credit-card), it would be thought, just so "weird" that I would receive a negative answer.
--ATG
23 June 2009 at 16:48
anonymous said "most of the books I've read were issued from libraries, borrowed from friends or purchased from scrap-pedlars for peanuts. (I know that's not exactly legal, but it helps me find some rare stuff, and it allows me to read as much as I want to)."
I'm wondering how many of these books from India would be on Amazon/Shelfari's database? Whether English is your language or not, it is definitely skewed to the US.
I come from the UK, and LibraryThing definitely has the edge here because of its wider catalogue.
18 August 2009 at 16:35
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home