Shelfari: Books in the Wild

(Disclaimer: what follows is an assignment consisting of three previous posts held together with duct tape in an ingenious fashion. Really, it's not my fault, they made me do it! For a nifty presentation I made in connection with this topic, conveniently located online, please click here and imagine my sweet voice telling you all about the spiffy screenshots. You may want to read the post below first, however.)

There's an ever-increasing number of tools and services of the web 2.0 type popping up in cyberspace on a daily basis. This has spawned a new type of service itself: sites that help you find new widgets, web 2.0 services, and other tools, all of which promise to facilitate something in your life which you want or need help with. After slogging through the mucky jungles of several find-your-tool sites, I came across Shelfari.com, "The Site for Books and Readers." What a great cyber oasis for a bibliophile like me! I had to go explore it! Here is what I discovered.

Shelfari opened its virtual doors to adventuresome book lovers in October of 2006. Like many other social networking services, it allows users to set up a profile, personalize content, record comments, and share with others. Like so many other nifty little web sites, it was bought up by a corporate giant: Amazon bought Shelfari in August of 2008, which explains where all the book images, links to buy books on Amazon, and Amazon ratings come from. To be fair, Shelfari also has Google Ads on their pages, so there are other book sellers being promoted there, but I'm sure Amazon is reaping some solid benefits from the "recommend," "review," and "discuss" functions on Shelfari as it does on Amazon.com. Word of mouth is a powerful selling tool, why not let the consumers do the work for you? But I digress.

Going off on a tangent is easy to do on Shelfari. Like Amazon.com, Shelfari will recommend books based on what you have on your personal bookshelf or whatever you are looking at, and each book's page has other clickable suggestions handily placed below the item description. If you don't get distracted reading the reviews, checking out who else has the book on their shelf, or exploring the groups who have the book, you can hop from one book to the next, like following a never-ending vine through vast stretches of knowledge and entertainment. If you are like me, you may eventually loose complete track of where you are and where you've been, but if you've been adding books to your wish list or the "plan to read" section of your bookshelf, you will come out of your adventure in bookland with some swell souvenirs.

Your travel options through this cyber jungle include plenty of options for socializing with fellow tourists. As mentioned, there are groups to join, or you can create a new social destination (a.k.a. "group") focused on just about anything remotely related to whatever books you may be navigating. Groups have discussion functions that operate in standard forum style, and discussions for any book can be started or joined by anyone, in or out of a group. These are accessed through the book's own page. If you are interested in a more one-on-one interaction, you can invite, find or make new friends. Shelfari will tell you which users it thinks are most like you based on your book collection, and you can post notes on other people's pages, provided they have set their security options to allow it.

Shelfari offers a cyber playland for book enthusiasts, with endless corners to while the time away in. If you have ever enjoyed losing yourself in a book, whether it be fantasy, horror, the latest popular science piece, or even those text books you bought because you had to, but kept because you wanted to, try out this site. You may discover your own, personal, literary oasis on the web.

For those of you who may not be avid book readers like I am, and who therefore may be wondering if Shelfari is worth a visit or not, trust me, it is. Shelfari has good potential for anyone interested in gender topics, which I must assume you are, or you have really wandered off the beaten path to be perusing this blog!

The importance of social networking and sharing knowledge cannot be underestimated; such networking and sharing is precisely what facilitated the boom in awareness and activism for transexuals and other transgender people in the 1990s. Before the Internet facilitated cross-country networking at the click of a mouse, trans people were often isolated from each other, with little to no information available about being trans. There was little to no information available in much of the country about how to navigate the treacherous waters of trans life. Tasks such as getting appropriate medical care; how to deal with official documents like driver’s licenses; how to looking convincingly enough like one gender or another so as not to get harassed, beaten, or killed; or even how to deal with choosing which public restroom to use had to be reinvented by each new individual trying to carve out a livable life in a world designed to exclude them.

Small groups came and went in large cities, but pulling together national networks was a struggle (for a history of these struggles, see Susan Stryker's Transgender History and Joanne Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed: A History of Transexuality in the United States). Trans people can now find out in minutes, through web resources, what used to take years to learn, and the extreme isolation of yesteryear has greatly decreased thanks to all the social networking groups now available. The emotional and psychological benefits of having a community to belong to are invaluable, to say the least.

Shelfari can direct users to resources on gender topics in seconds through its recommendations. Books for and by the queer community, feminists, and gender outlaws of all types can be found here, as well as other people with similar interests. A trans person alone in a small Midwestern town can meet other trans people online through social networking sites like Shelfari, and can find out what informative books are popular in the trans community at the same time. Believe me, books on trans topics are quite hot in many trans communities. Activists and young trans people especially are reading up storms of empowerment. As the feminist, lesbian, and gay movements have shown, gaining knowledge goes a long way in gaining power, and to effect the change that is needed for the health and safety of gender minorities everywhere, greater power is definitely needed!

Whether you are a trans person yourself, a budding feminist looking for resources to keep on fighting patriarchy and glass ceilings, or just interested in gender in general, Shelfari can help you find out who your peers are and what they are reading. As they like to say at my University, "Networking, networking, networking!" Go find your people today at Shelfari.com, it’s easy to do, and there's just something about Shelfari that inspires random exploration!

Even if you are the type that is put off by chance encounters through site surfing, don't let it stop you from using Shelfari! You aren't obligated to follow link after link through endless pages of books and commentary, you know. You have every opportunity to use this PC Magazine Site of the Week in a fully self-controlled manner, just as the many users of its Facebook application... might, er, well, probably don't do. You are under no obligation to participate in discussions with other users who have the same interests as you, potentially making some great friendships and happily productive networks of like-minded thinkers.

Anyhow, if you don’t wan to take my word for it, let me tell you what other people are saying about Shelfari. The site made the Hindustan Times "Best and Worst of 2007" list, and in the good, happy way, not the embarrassing, “think again” way. True, it's only a short little blurb, but at least it made it on the map! Actually, Shelfari caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal Tech section as well, which quotes Josh Hug, who co-founded the site, as saying the number of users was "six digits." That was back in October of 2007. They likely have seven digits by now - especially since getting bought up by Amazon.com about a year ago (and don't forget that Facebook app). Wow! That looks good!

Of course, there have been a couple of snafus along the path for this social networking site centered on books. Shelfari was accused of astroturfing (generating staged enthusiasm for itself) and a spam-like emailing application for inviting users' friends and acquaintances (every last one of them) to join the site. Shelfari claimed the first was an innocent mistake by a novice intern and the second - well, no word on that, as far as Wikipedia knows.

Overall, though, it is a useful site, as I have heartily declared. Other than having been publicly embarrassed, there are just a couple of notable downsides to Shelfari.com. The first is a problem common on social networking sites: sometimes users aren't all that enthused about the social part. Don't get me wrong, the Harry Potter pages have non-stop traffic; they seem to have their very own Shelfari Express to carry all known Potterphiles to the special wizarding realm on Shelfari. There were 288 groups found in a search for "Harry Potter," with membership ranging from one person to nearly a thousand. Searching in groups for “Hogwarts” pulled up another 41 wizarding associated groups, including one with a membership of 1841 aspiring magical creatures, er, fans. Apparently I'm still a muggle - it wouldn't let me see the group content without joining. Sorry, but I'm just not that into you, Harry Potter!

Most of the groups I was actually interested in joining, though - Queer Theory (featuring a lovely picture of everyone's favorite gender philosopher, Judith Butler), Molecular Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, and Anthropology - the Peopling of the Earth, for example, have been about as active as a penguin in the Sahara (does nine or more months of inactivity qualify as officially dead?).

The second problem irritates me even more, perhaps because it should be entirely within the power (and intelligence) of Shelfari and Amazon to fix, like NOW. You can't properly search tags.* You can tag any book with any tag you want, and clicking on a tag – yours or someone else’s – pulls up every book thus tagged, but the page of top 200 tags doesn't actually have any tags on it. What if I wanted to search a tag that wasn't in the top 200 and that I hadn’t yet used myself? No option for that, not that I could find, anyhow, and believe me, I tried! The one spot that does display some tags (which are clickable, thank goodness) is the "Most Popular" tab on the "Explore Books" page. There were only about 52 tags listed there at the bottom of the page, however, and the "more tags" link simply takes one to the useless top 200 tags page. Grrr! I want to have my gender and search it too, gosh darn it! This site would be much improved, and possibly more popular, were it to fix this glaring problem. Perhaps then more traffic would find my Gender and Anthropology groups, and we could have some actual conversations. After all, that is the official point of Shelfari.com!



*Since this was originally written, Shelfari has plugged tags into its "Top 200 tags" page. Consequently, I have removed the links from this section of my post, since I can't really just delete this section of my assignment. However, problems remain with tags at Shelfari - now the tag section at the bottom of the "Most Popular" tab of the "Explore Books" page is devoid of tags! Perhaps the tech people over at Shelfari are too busy reading books?