Shelfari: 34% More Delicious

Delicious Library isn't particularly delicious and is definitely not del.icio.us. (It's a virtual bookshelf for all your books, DVDs, CDs, etc., for the uninitiated.) When it came out a few years back it was heralded for its slick, albeit non-standard, interface and for the novel ability to import, well, novels, by scanning their barcodes using your Mac's camera. Flash forward to the present and it still looks pretty slick–Apple's taken some cues from their original interface and applied them to its own programs, which might make it standard but more likely makes Apple non-standard. Importing items via camera scanning is still pretty novel and still about twice as time consuming as just entering the UPC/ISBN by hand, given the amount of time it takes to line up a good picture. And Delicious Library remains a niche piece of eye candy because it never supported the next obvious step once you've inputted everything you own: sharing that information with your friends over the Internet to prove that you've got better taste than they do. (Hint: don't scan in your Dan Brown collection and no one will have to know about it.) Delicious Library's reach never extended beyond your OS X desktop.

Enter Shelfari. There are probably other social-networking-bookshelf sites, but Shelfari is the one I happened to come across yesterday, and I've already entered about half my bookshelf, so I think I'm set on using it. (This is similar to how I've no interest in re-entering my friends in Facebook or My Space; yes, Friendster sucks, but I'm lazy.)

Shelfari definitely has its faults. Its searches are slow, at least until it deals with the uptick in traffic its getting after its launch (or until it migrates off of ASP.Net...). It's hard to find the correct edition of the book you want in its search results, and many common book covers are missing. There's no RSS feed of a contact's bookshelf, though they do have a Flash-based badge for webpages to share your own bookshelf (look to the right on 34, with the other countless badges).

Still, it's a fun concept. You can check out My Shelf (updates still in progress) and if you sign up yourself, add me as a contact.

Oh, and if you for some reason did import a large library into Delicious Library already, you can export that and import it into Shelfari. So there is some use for it, after all.

Comments

  1. FormMarch 01, 2007

    Is there a feature to automatically import all of books from CC and Lit Hum? That way I could easily appear to be really smart over the interweb in the same way I do to the vistors to my actual home.

    Hopefully it allows for double posting to accomodate the book collections of people like Mike and Ann or Sharon and myself. You can never have too many copies of the Lattimore translation lying around.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousNovember 24, 2008

    Shelfari sucks too 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.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beep Beep Beep Beep, Yeah!

Cars are scary. They're big steel machines of doom. I do not trust that a car I operate won't just stop working as a drive it. I fear running over nails. I fear psycho people in lanes next to me losing their minds and making sharp turns of their steering wheels to crash into me...for no reason. No one (aside from Jeff) at all understands my fear of driving. Not just, "driving at night is a little creepy." We're talking nightmares. Every bad dream I have that I can remember involves me operating a vehicle careening out of control. Me driving a vehicle without brakes. Having to merge into traffic and not being able to maneuver the steering wheel. I drove a bit growing up (living in a Florida suburb, you kind of had to), but unlike the majority of my friends, I didn't have my own car. So I borrowed my parents' cars when necessary, to drive to and from my house and my buddies' houses, the mall, Borders, Friday's, and back home. I was terrified of chang...
Read more

In which I blog again, however briefly

Blogging has been sporadic at best (and postively tubercular at worst) throughout the past weeks as I haven't had much of an Internet connection. Now I do have much of an Internet connection, but only because I am at Ryan and Sarahs's home in Boston for the weekend, and they were kind enough to have a cable modem that doesn't suck. I've posted some nerd-phone photos of my trip on the Flickr side of things, and the basic gist is that I'm having a nice time with two of my favourite people. If anyone out there happens to work for Verizon and would like to set me up for DSL back in Brooklyn, I think I'm ready.
Read more

The Colorless Wonder

The oddest thing that I’ve gathered about Jeff (so far…I’m assuming there’s a lot more there) is that he is without any distinct color. No, I’m not talking about his colorBLINDness and color CLUELESSness, although that’s fascinating. (He really doesn’t know his colors. Try him some time. I said “chartreuse” or “magenta” the other day and he was all, “how can you possibly know what those mean!?!”) Jeff’s name, when it pops up in my mind or in my e-mail Inbox, does not take on a color of its own. And that’s weird for me. Because I spent the better part of my only-child-dom with either a book or my Crayola box of 64, when I see letters or numbers, my brain automatically links them with a distinct color. (This is, of course, a self-diagnosis.) The experts call this “condition” synesthesia . I don’t think I have the full-blown deal. Hardcore folks look at a page of text and see a rainbow in front of their eyes. Other sysenthites see colors when they hear certain tones, or vice versa. It’s a...
Read more