Shelfari

Introduced to me a couple of days ago by my colleague this social network has more than impressed me. I have been into book reading from quite a while now. As I am trying to find more interesting books I indeed use the most obvious way to find them i.e Google. This can indeed be quite exhausting to come up to a firm decision to choose the next book. The next best thing is to ask from your friends for a quick suggestion. The problem with this is, your tastes might vary leading you to picking a wrong book.

Shelfari makes your task a lot more simpler by building a community around book lovers. All you have to do is open an account and start exploring the books on the shelfs of book lovers, make friends having similar tastes, form groups, get recommendations on books , last but not the least see which books are the favorites this week. Shelfari even provides you with widgets to flash out your shelf on your blog. And I thought bookworms don’t use the web! By the way, here is my shelf.

BottleTalk

And you thought surfers were sober? Think again. If you have a flair for wine and don’t have the people to share it with, then Bottletalk will definitely be your rescue point. It doesn’t get more simpler than this. You don’t have to be an expert for bottle talk. I never have had a glance myself, of any wine stuff before. Looking at this site for a while makes me believe that wine has too trends, like in fashion.

With Bottletalk you can easily find the wine you want, by its appropriate tag or search for it, see how much popular it is and in which place in the world it is available. Also the user’s review on the drink will make you more confirmed as to whether your satisfaction will be fulfilled or not, in both terms, money and its magic! It even has a blog out there called bottleblog . Now who ever guessed only sober people could blog?

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Microsoft paid $240 million price for 1.6% stake in Facebook. This clears the view , world’s largest software maker, crudely wanted to deepen its relationship with a startup that didn’t have $200 million in annual revenue

This deal was the only thing which made me to open an account with Facebook. The only other friendship community I am associated till now was Orkut which in my opinion definitely gives a far more friendly user experience than FaceBook, especially now after having registered with Facebook.

I did look around for the reason as to why users prefer FaceBook over Orkut and was surprised to see that Facebook users are more than the number of Orkut users.

The main reason’s for users liking Facebook from what I found were:

1. Simple and professional user interface
2. Explanation for being added as a friend
3. Unique groups or communities
4. Security of user’s profile and information
5. Many other fun applications

The reason’s why users don’t like Orkut were as follows:

1. Amateurish interface (as seen prior to the new one I suppose)
2. Open scraps and profiles owing to less security
3. No provision for providing reasons to “Add as friend”
4. Repetitive groups or communities

The only point where people seemed to love Orkut was it was easier to find old friends and colleagues as compared to Facebook. The only drawback of Facebook was that in the resistance of a beginner to join in for the first time.

I have loved Orkut ever since I joined it after having a bad experience in a yet another online community called Hi5. But Facebook still hasn’t impressed me to the point to digest the fact that Microsoft has ploughed in $240 million (maybe a bitter outcome of Vista has turned its gaze to the online business).

If Facebook’s popularity was the case, then the question arises as to why did Google opt for Orkut?

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Once you open an account with LinkedIn you have to fill in proper details about yourself since without the details nobody would be interested to be linked to you. Once you are done with it you have the option of going inviting your colleagues to join the network or just go  or just wait and watch until somebody eagerly invites you to join his network.

Such a network grows speedily if your profile is interesting so an advice would be to make it as interesting as possible. What else could be more satisfying when someone from the same fraternity makes you popular by recommending you to others through his LinkedIn network.

Not only this, but you have a lot of goodies such as meeting interesting people, searching jobs, making friends with the big wigs in the network, recommending your friends to others, getting updates of any changes in your friend’s profile and much more.It also gives you options to downloads vcard of a member’s contact details. Its very easy to use and the user  interface is lovable.

It is also an icing on the cake when your old long lost friends make an apperance somewhere in the same network as yours. Hey, you just got linked in!

You can promote your LinkedIn profile through your own custom link as I have done in my sidebar for my profile and get known in the web world. Wordpress users will be more happy since there is a sleek LinkedIn script to decorate your blog’s sidebar.

So what are you waiting for. Get connected, get LinkedIn.

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