Archive for August, 2008

Amazon Buys Shelfari

Published on August 28, 2008 3 Comments

For the last 7 days I’ve been carrying around an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, thanks to a new loan program from the NCSU Library. I’ve fallen in love with the device, and in these 7 days I’ve read much more than I expected. I’m also a big fan of Shelfari, a site that lets you manage your books on “shelves” (much like Delicious Library on the Mac) with shelves for Read, Plan to Read, Wish List, and so on. In the last week, as I start a new book on the Kindle (the one I have had over 50 books preloaded on it by other students) I’ve had to log into Shelfari and manually add the book onto my shelf for books that I’m currently reading. This feeds me reviews and suggestions on related books.

A few moments ago, as I filled out a rating for a book I just finished (Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely) I started wondering if there was an opprotunity here. What if Shelfari could tap into your Kindle’s information, automatically filling your shelves with books you have on the device. This would deliver an experience quite a bit closer to the way Netflix monitors what movies you have at home, what movies your friends are watching, and what movies you have listed in your queue. I brushed the thought off, though, figuring that for an outfit as small as Shelfari to get so intimately involved with Amazon’s systems would need a level of access that Amazon would be reluctant to give. I also figured that Amazon wouldn’t want to invite such direct competition to their own “Media Library” service.

No more than 3 minutes later, I came across a post in the Shelfari Discussion Group announcing that Amazon has aquired Shelfari!

Amanda writes,

We just announced that Amazon.com has acquired Shelfari! This is a very exciting time at Shelfari and there are a lot of new opportunities in the future that will benefit all members. In the meantime, members will continue to have access to the great community and tools that you’ve always known and used on the site. You can continue to build virtual bookshelves and socially interact around the books you care about at http://www.shelfari.com/.

We look forward to working with Amazon to continue with our mission of building great communities that celebrate books. Thanks for your interest in Shelfari and Amazon.com.

Happy Reading,
Amanda

It makes sense… as Shelfari has been using Amazon’s repository of information, even providing “Buy This Book at Amazon” links for titles you come across. It will be interesting to see if Amazon leaves Shelfari as it’s own entity, much like Yahoo did when it aquired Flickr, or if it will pull the developers and existing code into Amazon’s own Media Library site. I think that a lot of users would like to see Shelfari remain independent, but as a heavy user of Amazon (as I think most web-savvy readers are) and a hopeful owner of the second revision of the Kindle, I can’t help but hope that Shelfari gets much more tightly integrated into Amazon’s print and electronic book sales systems.

WikiMe: Location Based Wikipedia

Published on August 15, 2008 1 Comment

WikiMe [iTunes Store Link] was just released by SupportWare for the iPhone and iPod Touch. WikiMe is another great application of the CoreLocation service built into the 2.0 Mobile OSX firmware. When you launch the app, it grabs your location and then shows you a list of Wikipedia articles of places in a configurable radius around your location. Touch an item in the list, and you view the Wikipedia article page in a built-in browser. From there you can show the location of the article’s subject in Google Maps, Bookmark the page in WikiMe’s bookmarks list, or e-mail a link to the Wikipedia article to a contact.

You’re not restricted to seeing articles for your immediate location though, you can plug in any zip code and get results, regardless of where you’re currently located.

I can see this app coming in very handle while traveling, especially in areas with a lot of history. It’s like a social media tour guide. At $0.99, I think the app is a great deal. Cheap enough to be bought without hesitation, but the authors are still getting compensation for their nicely executed app.

Sync Last.fm Events with iCal

Published on August 9, 2008 2 Comments

This may be old news to some, but it dawned on me to check for this a few minutes ago, and I was excited to see that it works exactly as I had hoped.

The [amazing] music site Last.fm has an events calendar system. Each artist page has an events listing, showing you when they’re playing where. There’s a great social networking mechanism where you can say that you plan to attend an event. You can see other users who are going, and there’s a message board for posting notes about the event. There’s even a unique Flickr tag for each event, and photos posted with that tag will automatically show up on that event’s page on Last.fm. As a user, you get an events calendar on the Last.fm site, but you’re planned events aren’t stuck there.

At the top of your events page there’s a iCal sync link. Click that link will add a subscription to your iCal that will auto update your calendar with your planned events. This is killer, the exact type of information freedom that we’ve come to expect from cutting edge sites. I recently found that it is possible to export Facebook events into iCal, but it looks like a one-time syncronization, and will have to be repeated as you add new events in Facebook. Last.fm, however, will automatically update your calendar, which makes the whole transaction seamless to the user.

What other sites with “event” tools have this level of syncing?