One thing I meant to mention during my effusion about Goodreads the other day: it uses the livejournal-style method of friending, which I hate, and I need it to go away from the internet. I end up getting friend requests which I have to delete, which I feel bad about. Because it’s lovely that someone wants to read my book reviews, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I want to read theirs, particularly if I don’t know them. There are people on there with 400+ friends, which isn’t useful if you’re using the site, as I am, to a) filter information about books from trusted sources to distill a list of things to read in the future, and b) compare notes on books with those same trusted peeps.
I wish every site like this would move to the Twitter style of friending, which not many people are talking about, but is one of the best reinventions of how the internet works in the last few years. It completely divorces the question of “Do I care if this person reads what I write?” from the question of “Do I want to read what they write?” I mean duh, they’re two completely different issues, but a lot of websites still treat them as the same thing. It’s almost never a 1:1 ratio though. I mean right? Goodreads would be amazing if they fixed this. Livejournal has ways to hack around this, but man how elegantly does Twitter handle this. I’m serious. Even though people only use it to complain about how their flight is delayed or to let people know that they posted to their blog, it’s still worth it.
