LibraryThing & Goodreads

LibraryThing: I joined LT because I've heard about it more/longer than Goodreads and because the instructions for joining Goodreads were waaaaaaay longer. I entered 5 books in my library and was hoping to get suggestions, but I'm not seeing where I go to get them. Do I have to tag my books first? Or write reviews? Good grief, I'm looking at the tags for "After Tupac and D Foster" and someone has tagged it "Tupak Shakur". Scary if you can't spell words from the TITLE of the book! In addition to being misspelled, some of the tags are very strange. I guess this is what happens when the masses are allowed to do a librarian's work, no? :)

Actually, what I think I might be more interested in is the LibraryThing groups. I joined a librarians group and a YA lit group and they both seem pretty active. Again, there's just not enough time to keep up on everything! I don't know if I will ever re-visit LibraryThing. I do like the widget that automatically adds book covers to your blog. If/when we do a collection development blog, I think it would be nice to have a new titles widget in the sidebar.

Goodreads: "Have you ever wanted a better way to see what your friends are reading?" Um, no, not really. I find the best way to find out what my "friends" are reading is to ask them. I do like the interface of Goodreads a bit better than LibraryThing. Not sure exactly why, the soft browns, not overly texty, the logo. I have a friend who uses this, so I've seen her account and I don't feel the need to sign up for another book account today. So I checked out the groups page and one of the first ones I notice is "The Haters Club" from Portland, OR. I can't see how this is book related, but whatever. They don't list nearly as many groups as LT and I don't see any that I'm in the least bit interested in joining.

I'm not really interested in writing book reviews for most of the books I read and if I want to read reviews from random people I'll continue to go to Amazon.com for those. I think these are interesting services, but not especially useful to me. I did add a book sharing application to my facebook account, but there was an implication that I would actually share the physical books with people, which is strange. It also gave me the option to read/write reviews for books. Social networking is exhausting!