Shelfari Widget – A Review

Shelfari is a social network built around books – members can share book titles in their personal collection, and meet people who have the same books.  The Shelfari widget is a means of displaying your “shelf” of book titles on your blog or social networking page.

I had been meaning to check out the Shelfari widget for a while, mostly because intuitively it makes a lot of sense.  Last.FM and iLike have both built great widgets around the consumption of music.  Why shouldn’t somebody be able to build one around the consumption of books?

The first thing I noticed about Shelfari is its design.  It’s strikingly clean and appealing.  Ajax is used for things like rating and tagging, and the whole thing just works.

I added a few titles to my shelf, and had no problem finding them in Shelfari’s database.  I then looked for a way to build my widget, with no success.   I looked in the main navigation areas of the site, and checked the FAQs.  Still nothing.  A search on Google pointed me to a write-up which told me to look for an “add to my blog” button.  Thus enlightened, I was able to find the widget button and trigger the widget configuration tool.

The Shelfari widget configuration tool is one of the slickest that I’ve seen.  It features a “basic” tab which allows you to select the widget’s destination, layout, and dimensions.  There’s also an “advanced” tab that provides further customization options.  Shelfari is able to communicate a ton of customization options without confusing the user.  There’s also a nice Ajax preview tool which shows you exactly what your widget will look like.

As you can see from my right sidebar, the front end of the widget is visually striking.  Viewers are able to toggle through the entire shelf of books, and the Flash format is really snazzy here.  Running your cursor over the each book image displays three links: one to read reviews, one to buy the book on Amazon, and one to view more info on the book.  The Amazon link is an affiliate link, which I assume represents Shelfari’s primary revenue model.  I didn’t see any mention of revenue sharing with the user.

So what are the strengths of this widget?  Displaying the books that one chooses to read is a powerful form of self-expression.  Just as folks seem to like to tell the world what music they are listening to, there is no reason to think that they wouldn’t want to do the same with books. 

I also think that the Shelfari widget is well-executed.  Except for my inability to find the widget configuration tool (which may be more of a user error than any design problem), the process was very easy, and the widget looks sharp in my sidebar.

Shelfari is, however, facing a couple of significant challenges.  All I have to do to keep my iLike widget loaded with fresh, self-expressive content is to listen to music.  Unfortunately, with Shelfari, my completion of a book doesn’t automatically add it to my shelf.  I have to log in, search for the book title, and explicitly add it to my shelf.  This is a big deal, and there’s really nothing that Shelfari can do about it.

To use my personal case as an example, I love to read, I love social media sites, and I love widgets.  But I’m still not sure if I’m going to be able to find the time to launch a whole new identity on Shelfari.  There’s a lot of neat destination services out there battling for a finite number of users.  It’s going to be tough for Shelfari to reach critical mass without closing a big bizdev deal or two.

Another challenge is the personal nature of the widget.  Because every Shelfari widget is highly customized to the user, this is not a widget that folks are going to grab and put on their own site.  They will have to see it, understand it, open up a new browser, join Shelfari, create their own shelf, build the widget, and add it to their own page.

Before I saw Box.net’s widget, I didn’t think it was possible to manage this entire process within the body of the widget.  Now I do think it’s possible, and strongly recommend to Shelfari that they explore the possibility of in-widget sign up and configuration.  There’s no reason that Shelfari couldn’t provide a “add this book to my shelf” option just like Box.net provides a “share in my box widget” option for each individual file, which triggers the join and configuration process.

As it stands today, Shelfari’s widget is primarily a one way widget.  It’s a neat tool for existing Shelfari users to project their Shelfari identities to the edge, but it’s not a tool that is going to drive significant levels of new sign ups.  My personal opinion is that the Shelfari widget needs to evolve from being a branding and affiliate revenue driver, to a self sufficient new registration capture tool.

The way to do this is to make each individual book title a hook into a new sign-up, that can be performed within the body of the widget.  I would expect this change to have a significant impact on the number of new sign ups that this widget generates.

If they can pull this tweak off, I believe that they have a decent chance to overcome the challenges related to being one of many explicit data dependent social networks.

See more about Shelfari on Widgets Lab,  Mashable and TechCrunch.

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