Invitations and updates

We've seen the recent emergence of complaints about Shelfari's invitations feature, and it's quite distressing.  We've been working hard over the last few months on our OpenSocial application, adding more web servers, releasing our new widget, creating a personal weekly email, and in parallel redesigning Shelfari.com (coming very soon!). We haven't taken the time to address the complaints about our invitations in our blog or by updating the site. We're changing that now.

It's been about five months since we last touched our invitation design.  In June we looked at a number of different designs with the goal of creating something easy to use as well as clear.  Recent feedback has been clear that our current design is not clear enough.  As I read through the feedback, and look at the experience afresh, I can see where the problems stem from.

Up until now Kevin B and Kevin D have been Shelfari's only two development resources, but I have exciting news!  We recently hired two super star developers -- Aaron & Jason.  We've also hired MikeS our first program manager (you'll be hearing from him soon).  Our new team will be much faster to address the needs of our users, including this invitation problem. Making our invitation flows clearer is one of the top priorities for our team. Look for updates to the invitation flow in the near future.

In the meantime, if you do encounter any issue or confusion with your invitations, please send us an email and we will take action to stop invitations from going out.  Since we started Shelfari we've tried to be very active in responding to users' questions and feedback and we'll keep doing that as we continue to grow.

Happy Reading,

Josh

UPDATE

We updated our find friends experience late Thursday night, which should make the experience infinitely clearer.  I'll write more about what we did and what impact it will have later on Friday.  Thanks everyone for your feedback and for support.

Comments

[Jigar Mehta]

Thats cool!
Congratulations guys on joining Shelfari.. Though there are lots of similar sites that provides this functionality, I still love to stick with shelfari.. but it really needs re-design of interface at some places! I hope new design will be awesome!

--Jigar

[ron]

Hey Josh, look at yourself in a mirror and say you are proud to steal goodreads and librarything in a so elegant way.

[ugh]

We've heard this before. The last time you were given the benefit of the doubt, you continued on with the spamming and even deleted comments in this blog that exposed your spamminess.

Genuine remorse? I doubt it. Not even an "it was wrong we won't do it again" straightforward admission. Instead, we get more vague, waffly, boilerplate exhortations to "check out" new designs (i.e. attempts to change the subject).

All very PR, and all very phony.

[David Wright]

Nowhere here do you address the real issue, which is your actual practices. Redisign the invitation? Stop pretending to be responsive when you know very well that you aren't. This is so disingenuous.

[Aasemoon]

Hi guys, this may not be very relative to the article.. but it would be very nice if you could look into the current situation with all the stats showing 0. It's been like this for 2 days now.
Other than this problem that has occurred a few times so far, I'm very happy with Shelfari [and I did give a try to similar websites, but I still like Shelfari a lot better]. Thank you and keep up the great job.

[Ennas]

Hi...this not be relative to the article... but could you explain for me what does "reading List" mean? is this mean "the books that I've read, or I'm reading" ?
THX