Amazon just acquired Shelfari along with used and rare book company Abe Books. Abe Books has been a long-time partner with and 40% investor in LibraryThing, a Shelfari competitor, so the Abe Books acquisition also gives Amazon a 40% stake in LibraryThing. A crowded shelf indeed. Details covered by Publishers Weekly and TechCrunch.

I’ve never been a fan of Shelfari: the UI is gaudy, the site is slow, there’s no way to make edits on large numbers of books quickly, and there’s very little room for user input or modifications. As for organizing your collection, Shelfari’s use of tags is so secondary that it’s nearly useless. Plus, if Amazon isn’t selling it, good luck getting it onto your shelf.

Tim Spalding, founder and CEO of LibraryThing, has more serious issues with Shelfari that I think are worth repeating:

As I’ve said before, I have respect for LibraryThing’s 40+ competitors, but withhold it for Shelfari. They were rather famously called out by me and by others in a series of blog posts exposing a program of spamming and of “astroturfing” (paid employees posing as excited users in blog comments). They apologized on both occasions, but I have, quite frankly, the greatest contempt for them, and for what book-based social networking will become if they beat out LibraryThing.

Picture a boot stomping on a human face forever. Well, okay, not that. But picture the book social network wars ending with a site created by music people who probably wouldn’t get that allusion, with advertising all over, with “community managers” “managing” conversations between book lovers, and under the shadow of what will sell books and not books’ other, greater values. In short, I believe there’s something “to” the idea of book-based social networking which they don’t get, and to which they are a danger. Yes, I’ve drunk my own Kool-Aid.

I’ve been a long-time user of LibraryThing. It’s quick, allows users to contribute to book details, has active and thoughtful discussions that revolve around the books, and is great at allowing users to organize their books easily in a variety of ways. I tend to think of Shelfari as the choice for people who like to look at shiny book covers sitting on their shelf and LibraryThing as the choice for people who like what’s between those covers.

I do have two gripes with LibraryThing, though. While the UI is faster and more useful than Shelfari, and allows for lots of great ways to organize and benefit from the information surrounding the books, the actual look of the site could be improved, particularly if it hopes to compete with Shelfari.

More importantly, LibraryThing, after a long series of promises, discussions, and flip-flopping, decided not to create an official Facebook application. This was a serious mistake, in my opinion. While many of my friends are book-lovers, only a few have that combination of book-lover and web-geek that would compel them to enter, tag, and discuss their book collections on a books-only social network. However, many of my friends will happily share what they’re reading with others on Facebook, and since LibraryThing doesn’t have an app through which I can do that, I have to use another service if I want to join in on that sharing. That’s a lot of word-of-mouth support for LibraryThing that just ain’t happening.

I don’t even know where to begin with this recent article from New York Magazine, “Testing Horace Mann,” about the fallout (or lack thereof) from offensive student postings on Facebook.  It’s at the center of the current technology-related problems schools face.  Part of this has to do with new problems the technology makes possible, but much of this has to do with old problems that the technology makes visible.

The most disturbing aspect for me is the lack of guidance, and this is an old problem.  How else do we expect adolescents to act, particularly when given free reign in the technological playground of social networks, when they have no clear or firm guidance from school administrators or parents?  This is by no means a pardon for the students, but the strongest rebuke should fall on the shoulders of the parents for trying to shelter their children from the thing most likely to help them succeed in the world: the trimming down of the ego (a societal problem, really).  Second in line should be the administration for failing to issue that rebuke.

The new problems are the more difficult ones, and require more time, thought, and research than I can put in right now.  Questions about privacy, online identity, safety, censorship, and the like all bear heavily on these events … events that are, to different degrees, happening in every school.

I’m firmly in the @injenuity “The Network is People” camp. And I freaking LOVE my network.

I’ve been experiencing an annoying glitch on my MacBook Pro since upgrading to MacOSX 10.5 - nothing serious, but occasionally it’d bug me. What happened was, if I opened a Finder window to /Users - it would show every user’s home directory except mine. I mean, I know it’s there, because all of my files are there. And if I used Terminal or remote SSH login, the directory was certainly there, as were all of my files. If I used Finder’s Go to Folder command (Command + Shift + G) I could enter “/Users/dnorman” and all was well.

But it was annoying.

Every once in awhile, I’d try to debug. I’d use Terminal and navigate to /Users. I’d run ls -l and I’d see this:

$ ls -l
total 0
drwxrwxrwt   7 root     wheel     238 23 Mar 15:17 Shared
drwxr-xr-x  13 demo     demo      442 14 May  2006 demo
drwxr-xr-x@ 47 dnorman  dnorman  1598 31 Mar 18:12 dnorman

The other user directories had either a + or no symbol after the file mode section. My directory had a @. WTF. I’ve tried looking through man. man ls. man chmod. Couldn’t find any mention of @. Try googling for @. Not helpful. This is where the gaping holes in my *NIX geekery are exposed. I was completely stumped.

Finally, I decide to try checking with the LazyWeb. I posted a tweet to roughly describe the problem - as best I could in the 140 character limit - and…

Waited 3 minutes before @thepatrick responded with a hint, and another one.

So, a few seconds later, I was running a new (to me) command via the command shell, finding out about xattr to list extended attributes about files.

$ xattr -l /Users/dnorman
com.apple.FinderInfo:
0000   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ........@.......
0010   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................

Bingo. There’s some funky bit set. So, how to nuke it. I ran man xattr and found it has a -d flag, which is used to delete attributes by name. So I ran this:

$ xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo /Users/dnorman

Done.

My home directory now properly shows up in Finder. Everything’s hunky dory.

The power of my Network, harnessed with a simple LazyWeb plea, solved in 3 minutes what I’d struggled for 5 months to solve on my own.

I love my Network. It’s the people.

Thanks, Patrick. I owe you a $beverage.

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