Changes to Shelfari's invitations

I thought I'd give up an update on the changes we made Thursday night to invitations on Shelfari.  We made a fairly radical update that makes invitations clearer for everyone finding friends on Shelfari, fixing its core problems  The most significant issue with the former design was that when members had more than five or six friends on Shelfari, the list of their friends not yet using the service dropped below the fold.  So when a member clicked "Send Invite", it sent to the whole list of friends, including that group that the member never saw because those names were pushed below the fold by the list of friends on Shelfari.

Our new design uses two separate pages for the two very separate actions of 1) requesting friendship with those already on Shelfari, and 2) inviting new friends to the site.  Looking at best practices of sizable social networks, we see that this change is necessary and given our size was overdue.  Now that we've divided these actions on separate pages, we feel that Shelfari is back on track to providing the best user experience for our members and their friends.

Mike and Josh plan to talk in greater detail about what we've changed and how if affects our members later this week.

Dave