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October 2, 2008
Review of GoodReads
Starting to review some of the vertical markets that have created community around certain product categories. Like Books. One of the first of these was AllConsuming.net started by my friends in Seattle, now owned by RobotCoop. While AllConsuming was one of the first, there hasn't been much investment in it for some time.
The clear leader in non-amazon book community sites is GoodReads. There are alot of things to like about the site. Here in my normal terse fashion are my likes and dislikes and summary:
Likes:
clean look and feel.
complete, rhobust search.
lots and lots of content, very active site. Very cool.
Good global connection ability to other readers.
facebook application is not too horrible, but doesn't do anything interesting either. it only imports facebook friends. No matches leaves me with nothing else to do.
have a basic swap feature.
Explore section is nice. Shows me some relevant books. Gives me lots of different ways to browse, popular, most read, unpolupar, listopia, ebooks, etc.
like the event section, auto propogate from bookTour. I don't get the impression that these are many user generated events though. Very cool local search.
good bookclub group functions.
they had my mother's book, Great walks in Florida.
they do all the right retention things to keep people engaged on the site.
the search for people is very good, easy and relevant.
in the find new people section, there is a "rate the book" quiz that takes you through 20 books and you see how your ratings match up with the other person's. Cool.
Dislikes:
stop pestering me to invite friends.
not very local. No clear way to connect with other book lovers of my interestes locally.
why don't they have outlook "friend" integration?
swap feature is hard to find, not promoted and i can't find anything or anyone to swap with.
many places they make you copy and paste HTML code instead of opening your mail client, etc. This is annoying.
a quick search of people profiles shows that many are inactive.
Summary: Useful site, needs a few more features, but I will keep coming back. Useful in the end.
Posted by Martin at October 2, 2008 9:38 AM
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