Indigo does a BOOKface
Posted on September 23, 2007
Filed Under media, Music, Computing, News, Books and Movies |
Indigo’s Community - where Canadians booklovers connect!
Chapters.Indigo.ca has just unveiled its community social networking site. Think of it as a niche Facebook for books, DVDs, and music in Canada. Overall user experience is good, with unobtrusive AJAX making data input clean. An honourable mention goes to respecting privacy, asking for only an email address Name (or Pen Name), city, an opt-in for email notifications, and if you are an iRewards member.
From a software design perspective, the “normal” cases have been well thought out and easy for the user to perform the task. The exception cases are less than not well thought out, they are not implemented. Delete a group? Ratings cannot be unset? Why is there no clear way to search the groups that exist? I’m a friend of someone, but I still get the message that the user’s friend list not publicly accessible and only available to friends….hmmm?
Update: Group searching is not implemented yet, source
In general look for more of these Facebookesque niche sites to pop up. The problem with one social networking site the does it all is that it cannot do it all well, and the group of associates you build (aka “friends”) quickly exceeds 150 (see Dunbar’s Number). Not to mention you do not want to have a single account that your family, employer, educator, drinking buddies, etc. all have access to.