Archive for the ‘shelfari’ Category

Thursday, January 14th, 2016

Import your Shelfari library and get a free LibraryThing account

We’ve long supported imports from Shelfari into LibraryThing, and with the news that Shelfari is being merged with Goodreads, some folks are looking for a new online home for their books. Now you can import your Shelfari library, and receive an automatic upgrade to a free lifetime LibraryThing account! Here’s how to do it:

UPDATE: We’ve seen a number of Shelfarians becoming more active on LT recently, and we’re happy to have you! You might find some of your old friends over in the Shelfarians on LibraryThing group, created and managed by your fellows.

Export Your Shelfari Data

You’ve got a couple options when it comes to exporting your Shelfari library, and can either directly download a file, or have one emailed to you. See Shelfari’s instructions here.

Sign Up for LibraryThing

It’s quick and free! Head over to LibraryThing.com and click “Join Now.” Enter your desired username and password (we also recommend including your email address, for password resetting purposes), and you’re good to go!

If you’ve already got a LibraryThing account, you can import your Shelfari library to your existing account.

Import Your Shelfari File to LibraryThing

Once you have your Shelfari export file, go to our Shelfari Import page and upload it there.

Enjoy

Welcome to your new library on LibraryThing! We’re happy to have you. Take a look around, and get to know the place a bit. We recommend the Short Introduction for a quick overview of features.

If you have any questions, Talk—our discussion forum—is a great place to start, and you can always email us at info@librarything.com.

Labels: import, shelfari

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

New server/Shelfari evidence

If you don’t notice anything, you can congratulate Felius, who just moved us to a new, dedicated web server. Believe it or not we’ve been running our web server and our main “write” database on the same machine. (Also, we put forks in toasters!) Anyway, the new server should help us out in a number of ways, and we have some very cool updates coming soon. Among other things, we’ll be increasing our library sources by many hundreds of libraries.

In other news, I just posted my evidence that one of our competitors, Shelfari, engaged in a campaign of “astroturfing”—posting blog comments pretending to be users. This follows my evidence that they’re grown by something close to spam, a deceitful invite interface. It is certainly true that I’ve got the bit between my teeth on this—I have been holding back on this stuff for months. When you get right down to it, the evidence is so damning I don’t care what people think of my motives. Anyway, I have been eager to praise other competitors for their sites (see both posts). Pick the best site, just don’t pick the one that cheats.

“Social cataloging” has become something like an industry, with over 40 sites in a dozen languages. I think our success was a major factor, but we know we didn’t start it.* When one bad actor—and the best-funded one!—behaves so poorly it reflects on all of us. Indeed, I finally decided to go public with my URLs after I told someone on a plane what I did and they asked if I was that site that was sending all those spammy invitations.

I’m proud of what I do. I think there’s something legitimately interesting underneath (see my Library of Congress talk). A bunch of music people with a million dollars from Amazon and no ethics is not going to spoil the party.

There. That felt better. So, I’ve got them off my chest. Time to hunker down and pump out some useful and important features—collections, better language parsing, better secondary-author functionality. As always, thank you for all the support.

*Bibliophil did, or perhaps 37Signals’ Singlefile.

Labels: server, shelfari, spam