AdaptiveBlue's Smartlinks

AdaptiveBlue invited me to try out their new widgets and functions, and after checking out their website, I couldn't find a compelling reason not to.  The Post Pub now features SmartLinks, which are little boxes after book titles that, when clicked, offer up a java window interface that gives some nifty snapshot info about the book in question.  Anything relatively unobtrusive that furthers online conversations about books is a-OK in my book.

Test it out -- here are the titles of the books in which I have bookmarks at the moment:

• Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Collapse
• O. Henry Awards, 2002
• The Discomfort Zone

I like the fact that the plug-in allows for readers to bookmark books on their favorite social sites.  However, links like "Add to Shelfari" (or Goodreads, or LibraryThing) confuse me, because isn't Shelfari meant to track the books that are already on your shelf?  I'll have to give that function a trial run, to see if this is a true, useful bookmarking tool -- if it allows me to surf a blogger's site, read about a book they're reading, and with one click, add that book to my "must read next" list.

Another question:  where do the Tags come from?  The interface lists a series of tags ascribed to the book. I'd like to know who generates these tags.  Are they gleaned from Amazon and social sites?

In any event -- a good plug-in: nice-looking, informational, and social. We'll see if it catches on.

Comments

[Fraser]

Hi guys,

Thanks for installing SmartLinks and thanks for the kind words!

Our goal actually is to increasingly further online conversations about books, so we're glad that you share our vision.

To answer some of your questions, the tags are automatically generated based on the analysis of the page that you link to (either Amazon or B&N).

We added the ability to "add to Shelfari" because we received a number of requests from individuals who use our product to add it. I guess they may like to add books to the service that they are about to buy? We're always looking to improve the user experience so we added it and have observed a positive response.

We also have a number of book widgets - both popular lists that update automatically (NYT Bestsellers for example) and custom widgets for book lists (such as the Cybils finalists).

You can preview both at the following sites:

http://www.adaptiveblue.com/widgets_auto.html
http://blog.adaptiveblue.com/?p=834

If you have any questions, or feedback - please drop me a line fraser [dot] kelton [at] gmail [dot] com

Best!

Fraser

[Kristen (Pub Editor)]

Fraser,

Thanks for answering my question about how the Tags are generated.

I think the various "Add to" buttons are great, don't get me wrong. I'm still trying to figure out how people are using Shelfari, LibraryThing and Goodreads. I used your SmartLinks to add the books above to my shelf at LibraryThing, but best I can tell, I don't have the ability on that social site to easily separate "Books I Want to Read" from "Books I Already Own". Seems like their default setting is the latter, but to a casual blog reader, I think the ability to collect a "must read" list is more useful.

It's a cool service you're offering -- I do hope it catches on.

[Fraser]

It only catches on if we provide a high quality product, a good user experience, great customer service... and our users talk and promote the product!

So I thank you for your support :)