The wisdom of the (Twitter) crowd
Posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 7:55pm. #
As my brother, the famous XMPP and IMAP specialist Dave Cridland said recently, “I’ve no interest whatsoever in following James’s Twitter feed, and I’m his brother. Surely, it cannot possibly be more interesting for anyone else?”
Thankfully, that’s not the case for 202 people, who get my mostly inane “really tired tonight, big day yesterday” or “in the Crown and Sceptre if anyone fancied a beer” tweets with good grace and at least mild interest.
Dave popped up this morning via instant message to me, and asked the not unreasonable question:
I’m looking for a social website, but I can’t find one that fits what I want. I’m just looking for one where I can say “I’ve got/read this book, I thought it was good”. Nothing more than that, but all the book-related Web 2.0 things seem dedicated to my giving all my books away.
I had no idea, so I asked my Twitter followers:
jamescridland: is wondering if there’s a social website that does “I’ve got/read this book, I thought it was good” – anyone?
…and the answers came thick and fast…
andybee: @jamescridland Shelfari?
jjn1: there’s a Facebook app called Visual Bookshelf (or some such)…
fidothe: @jamescridland http://allconsuming.net/
billt: @jamescridland http://www.librarything.com/ – and you can get a cuecat scanner to enter your own library really fast
perreau: I have a feeling the people behind http://www.gurgle.com are building one. Not Mothercare, the development folks.
davebriggs: @jamescridland I run http://palimpsest.org.uk/forum which is old school but reasonably high minded
pete_bug: @jamescridland this one is pretty good: www.anobii.com
matstace: @jamescridland my wife uses “visual bookshelf” facebook app, not sure if there’s a stand-alone site for it though.
asimaythink: @jamescridland Maybe goodreads.com (untested)?
tristanf: @jamescridland LibraryThing
frankieroberto: @tristanf @jamescridland LibraryThing is great, but the problem is that we don’t consume books online, so it’s quite an effort to add them…
tristanf: @frankieroberto Which I guess is why I don’t use it
jamescridland is grateful for the book social media suggestions. I asked on behalf of my brother, who is now happily using librarything
billt: @jamescridland tell him to get http://www.librarything.com/cuecat – it’s brill (works on Mac too!)
mydogminton: @jamescridland Just as you mentioned www.librarything.com/ I had stumbled across webby nominee www.bookglutton.com
Nico_Macdonald: @jamescridland I use LibraryThing http://www.librarything.com/ but it hasn’t taken off yet in our world.
Nico_Macdonald: @jamescridland Goodreads http://www.goodreads.com/ is a little less rough feeling. On FB Virtual Bookshelf is good, and has social tools.
Who needs Google when you’ve got the wisdom of the Twitter crowd?
Photo: Nathan Makan. Used under licence.
