Thursday, March 6th, 2008

LibraryThing Local explodes

This morning, three days after its official launch, LibraryThing Local passed 9,000 venues. (UPDATE: 10,000 13,000 15,000 16,000.)

In this time some 700 members have entered more libraries, bookstores, fairs and other venues than our closest competitor in this space assembled in ten months of work, drawing mostly on chain bookstores and publicists.

Much remains to be done. New York City looks like it’s been attacked by a swarm of smurf bees, but Athens, Greece is still pretty empty. And events—while over 1,100 now—aren’t growing as fast as we’d like. (I blame a joyless, balky interface, which will soon be fixed.)

LibraryThing Local’s success follows on LibraryThing’s series project which, in two weeks assembled more book series data than the largest commercial supplier of this data.

Together, I think these suggest something important: The most powerful agents in the book world today are regular people.

LibraryThing is blessed with the most extraordinary members I have ever heard of. They’ll hunker down for hours adding information for fun and to help out their fellow members. They’ll engage in two- and even three-hundred message discussions over features. They make Facebook aps and browser enhancements on their own. They send us new logo designs. They send Abby postcards. They send us cookies.

They—and given the readership of this blog, probably YOU—are something else. It is a real surprise and honor to find myself developing software under these conditions. It’s up to us to keep you interested and happy, and think of new things to do with what you create. It’s up to you to tell us when we’re falling short of that.

Labels: librarything local, members

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