The Shelfari Army--veinglory

If people want to join Shelfari, that's fine. Apparently a new wave of people are currently discovering this Amazon-listed book based networking site.

but

Do not press the invite button and spam everyione you ever gmailed. Twice. (They send two emails for each member, they don't bother to track whether than person has already been emailed the same spam eleventy-million times.)

Now it was a minot concession that they finally made a fairly-hard-to-find opt out form.

but

It's stopped working for me and I am getting the emails. Again.

Seriously do they not understand how irritating it is to get this flood of email when Shelfari themselves don't have any easily found customer support or complaints email address (anyone know of one?). As a small press author I already favor other services not locked into Amazon (e.g. Librarything) but from now on I think I will take any chance offered to suggest people not use Shelfari. I just need a cute slogan/logo to sum up why they suck. Any suggestions?

(I guess some of you probably like them, feel free to tell me about that too).

Shelfari My Arse...

Well, we still have the G-rating so far LOL.

Like me you have probably got a lot of unintentional spam about Shelfari. My advice is, don't do it. But if you must, do some research first.

Shelfari advertises themselves as the first book-based social networking site. They aren't.

Shelfari has spamming your gmail contacts as the step right after signing up, making mistaken use of it common. Besides, that's asking people recommend a service they haven't even used yet.

Shelfari makes it easy to import your records from a competitor but impossible to export them back again.

Shelfari uses only Amazon's catalogue when competitors use multiple sites. Quite by coincidence Amazon is a part owner of Shelfari. (Yeah right, expect 'monetising' strategies very soon).

On the plus side they have a pretty 2.0 website, they are sparkling new and have a lot of (largely accidental) cheerleaders. Are we seeing the parallel here? ;)

If you happen to want to be part of a book-based social networking site you should... 1) think about what you want in such a site, 2) discover what sites are out there and 3) pick the best one... if you decide that is Shelfari please keep your finger off the INVITE button!