Why Shelfari.com sucks so much!
Generally I am not the kinds who write about a product or service on my blog and say bad things about it. But then I have to say this …
The website Shelfari.com is a new service to let people talk about the books that they have read etc and I think that is a great idea. However what sucks is the cheap tricks they pull off to get people to signup. You have an option to import your gmail contacts (like other websites) and in itself nothing bad about it. However it shows you two lists, one below each other. The list on the top is people who are a member of shelfari already (a few) and then a invite button and the list below that is a list of people who are not member of shelfari (a few hundred may be if you use gmail etc that stores all addresses) and an invite button below this list. By default all the contact are checked (shelfari/non-shelfari). Most likely you would never have the strength to uncheck so many (A better behaviour that even linked-in does is to have everything unchecked by default)
Any sensible guy would assume that clicking on the button below shelfari members list would invite them and clicking below the non-shelfari members would invite them. However I clicked the button to connect with friends on shelfari and the invitation went even to members who are not on shelfari (about 600 in my case). Not this is some serious serious SPAM. Also after a few days a ‘gentle reminder’ goes to everyone who has still not joined (They write a disclaimer on the invite page, I later saw that you will never read or misunderstand)
I feel as a web 2.0 company this is some really bad practice …. users are used to certain ways and you should not try to take advantage of them and put little gotchas that work for you …. I just wonder if shelfari can bring in real active users like this to their website .. I am surely never gonna use the site again …
I hope in the near future, Shelfari would take care of that .. Goodluck to them and be careful before you hit invite!
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Comments
Hey Prateek,
I agree with you.Even I joined Shelfari and after joining it, doing the things that you have mentioned was a pain.This would be more painful to people who don’t use Internet to the fullest.
Importing contacts from Gmail,Yahoo and other mail services is common and work very well in case of LinkedIn but in this case ,it is horrible.
One other irritating thing is the widget that you can put on the blog/site,which is also very ugly and I am sure that most of people would not prefer to put that widget on their blogs (:
On important thing,you missed out:
Shelfari is supported by Amazon and still the site is not good.
Shelfari was officially launched in October 2006 with Josh Hug and Kevin Beukelman as the co-founders., Amazon.com invested in Shelfari in February 2007 and Shelfari immediately formed a board of advisors combing a list of high profile individuals. For further information on Shelfari, check out the featured links on the left hand side.
This is one of the classic examples of how a big brand name can create so much hype though the services are not good :)
-Himanshu Sheth
Shelfari.com Spam…
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!The latest attempt to get into people’s webmail accounts is from a group Shelfari. Apparently set up as a service to help your friends learn about new books to re…
[…] careful out there. Today’s Web 2.0 spammer: Shelfari. Another Web 2.0 social-something-something site with so little confidence in their own stuff, they […]
thanks for your comment on shelfari, like you i thought the site very exciting until it started giving me problems, That was an excellent and gentle comment, I just hope that big brands like amazon should not collaborate with such company, many thanks again and goodbye shelfari, for the moment
Dude, when I’m signing up to this kind of sites, I never use that invitation “feature”. Always try to avoid that. Cheers!
the repeat invitation is very annoying, especially when they don’t even bother to check if you’re an existing member!! I find it much easier to use the visual bookshelf on fb… the only reason i even checked that out was because shelfari’s fb application just refused to work initially…
Hey
I have not much explored Shefari or whatever that is, but I did really loved the way you put this blog. I think that was very honest feedback which even Shefari guys would love to read it.