Prateek Dayal

Generally I am not the kinds who write about a product or service on my blog and say bad things about it. But then I have to say this …

The website Shelfari.com is a new service to let people talk about the books that they have read etc and I think that is a great idea. However what sucks is the cheap tricks they pull off to get people to signup. You have an option to import your gmail contacts (like other websites) and in itself nothing bad about it. However it shows you two lists, one below each other. The list on the top is people who are a member of shelfari already (a few) and then a invite button and the list below that is a list of people who are not member of shelfari (a few hundred may be if you use gmail etc that stores all addresses) and an invite button below this list. By default all the contact are checked (shelfari/non-shelfari). Most likely you would never have the strength to uncheck so many (A better behaviour that even linked-in does is to have everything unchecked by default)

Any sensible guy would assume that clicking on the button below shelfari members list would invite them and clicking below the non-shelfari members would invite them. However I clicked the button to connect with friends on shelfari and the invitation went even to members who are not on shelfari (about 600 in my case). Not this is some serious serious SPAM. Also after a few days a ‘gentle reminder’ goes to everyone who has still not joined (They write a disclaimer on the invite page, I later saw that you will never read or misunderstand)

I feel as a web 2.0 company this is some really bad practice …. users are used to certain ways and you should not try to take advantage of them and put little gotchas that work for you …. I just wonder if shelfari can bring in real active users like this to their website .. I am surely never gonna use the site again …

I hope in the near future, Shelfari would take care of that .. Goodluck to them and be careful before you hit invite!

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