Green Tea Ice Cream

Another day, another social network.

A noted social networking blogger sent me a Shelfari invite the other.  I was initially flattered (I mean, why me? I don’t exactly move in the same circle) but my own encounter with Shelfari’s ‘Find Your Friends’ interface left me wondering whether they’d been stung the same way.

Like any other social network worth it’s salt, Shelfari has one of those “invite your friends” interfaces that logs into your Gmail/Homail/Yahoo etc account and pulls down your contact list.  That’s where the trouble started.  It offers you the list with each address already selected for an invitation and you have to remember to click the tiny “Unselect all” control before your over-enthusiastic motor functions go for the MUCH BIGGER “Send” button.

Which is what happened to me.  Butterfingers. (And it also happened, very publicly, to Jesse Wegman of the New York Observer).

Now whilst this isn’t exactly a user interface faux pas of Quechup proportions, it does have unwelcome side effects.  In my case, it meant the Shelfari invite was immediately followed up by another one from me apologising for the spam and explaining what had happened.  So instead of gaining a dozen or so new users, perhaps a hundred or so regular users of other social network sites received an email from me telling them that (implicitly) Shelfari wasn’t a very good idea.

That’s a shame, because (and note how this particular interface decision has meant that I’ve spent 200 words dwelling on the negative before even mentioning what the site does) Shelfari is an obvious but solid niche idea implemented very nicely.    It’s social networking based around books.  You have all the usual profile, friends, groups etc. infrastructures you’d expect plus a Bookshelf where you can add books you’ve read and the usual “revenue” generating widgetisation.  Sounds dull?  That’s what I thought, but discovering who’d read the same books turned out to be weirdly compelling.  It isn’t so much the big sellers (6000 users had read Pi) as discovering who the other six people who’d read The Story of Tibet by Thomas Laird happened to be.

So I’ll probably be returning.  It’s just a pity none of my friends will.  It’s also generating a considerable amount of negative buzz around the blogosphere in just the demographic where Shelfari least wants this sort of thing to happen – readers, outright bibliophiles and writers.  And all over a simple, obvious usability error.  Hopefully it’s an error – I like to think good things about people.