Goodreads

Social networking sites are everywhere—you have your MySpace, your Facebook, Friendster, hi5, Vampire Freaks (umm … yeah, 1,020,500 members)—offering the average Joe and Jane a place to meet people, chit-chat, as well as make “friends” with their favorite bands. They are what they are: brain-dead time wasters. Otis Chandler decided to go the nerdy route when he created Goodreads.com, a site that allows avid readers (and not so avid readers) to rate books and share recommendations with their friends. What makes Goodreads different from the popular LibraryThing.com is that users can review books themselves on their “read” shelf, and rate them using a five-star system, rather than waiting for recommendations and reviews from Amazon’s prescribed lists. It’s more … well, friendly. Users can befriend people with similar tastes—even if Harlequin romances are your thing, you’ll probably be able to find others who share your love of fictional lust. If you’re like me, your to-read list is probably scattered amongst notebooks, scraps of paper and undependable gray matter. Goodreads’ best feature might be the “to read” shelf where you can organize that growing list of books you still haven’t gotten around to. Then again, that might be a little depressing.