LibraryThing

22May06

This thing is very cool. You type in the title of a book you own (or have read) and it matches to Amazon to give you the full book details, which can then be added to your LibraryThing profile. Enter up to 200 books gratis.

You can then see what others who've read many of the same books are also reading (social-based recommendations), organize your books on a virtual "shelf" (a bit geeky but still kinda cool), and publish your booklist to your blog/profile elsewhere.

I think this is another social network vertical that has the potential to do very well. Like Flickr (for photos), YouTube (for videos), del.icio.us (for URLs), LinkedIn (for professional contacts), etc, these ventures provide value primarily for (1) personal content organization, and (2) new content discovery.

Further, since media consumption generally reflects a person's interests and knowledge (i.e. you are what you "eat"), these sorts of offerings provide a handy way to share your tastes and experiences with others via a feed to your main blog/profile.  I'll add my booklist here soon.

For those following:  Abebooks just took a 40% stake in LibraryThing.  

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