Shelfari Online book community Review

Website – Free registration
Social Networking / Online book community
Taste Makers, Inc
http://www.shelfari.com/

I recently received an invitation from some one to join this site. I usually just ignore invitations that I receive sheerly because there’s no use maintaining an account at thousands of sites if you cant really do justice to all of them. However the theme of Shelfari caught my eye and being an avid book reader, I immediately went over to the site. I was quite surprised that I hadn’t heard about the site before, shelfari turned out to be an instant hit in my books.

Shelfari is basically a social networking site where online communities of bookies can show off their books, discuss about books, share interests and opinions and even get and give book recommendations to their friends. You can create a virtual bookshelf that your friends can have access to. Its an really great way to let others know about the books you are reading, you have read, the ones you own and even the ones you plan to read. You can check out my shelfari shelf at : http://www.shelfari.com/peekay5000/shelf

You can ‘register’ an unlimited number of books on your shelfari account and arrange them in various shelves, you can also tag them for further classification. You can also join various communities so that you can get in touch with like minded people and get recommendations on what to read next. But in my opinion the best feature is the widget which you can put on your blog, website or social networking sites. You can see a sample of the widget below at the end of the post.

The website is also quite well done and has a very clean interface. Its a proper Web2.0 application with AJAX et all which really speeds up the site.

But in spite of that, the biggest complaint I have about Shalfari is the speed. The site is excruciatingly slow on a dial up connection. It takes 2-3 minutes to load each page and time out errors are very abundant. Even when I click on the “Add to Shelf” button after performing a search, it takes about a minute to perform the operation.

It would also have been great if there was an “auto recommend” function which would auto recommend me new books based on the books I’ve already read and liked.

But all in all this is an excellent site and a must visit for any and all avid book readers. Hope to see you on Shelfari… and if you do join don’t forget to add me as a friend, my profile can be reached at : http://www.shelfari.com/peekay5000 .

Pranav blogs at Die Hard Critic.