ReadWriteWeb

Kindle Profiles is a social service that was quietly launched by Amazon in March of this year. Its existence was little known, probably because it wasn't very useful as a social tool until Amazon recently added connections to Twitter and Facebook. I myself only discovered the service after VC Fred Wilson blogged about it the over the weekend. Kindle Profiles appears to be gaining some early traction now, thanks largely to Kindle Profile users auto-following people in their Twitter and Facebook networks. As Wired pointed out, this is a somewhat dodgy tactic, because the user cannot turn off this auto-follow behavior.

Regardless, what's of most interest to me is how Amazon is actively trialing a social reading service connected to the Kindle brand. While Amazon owns the social reading service Shelfari, which it acquired three years ago, it hasn't integrated Shelfari in a deep way into Kindle. In this post, we review the features of Kindle Profiles and ask whether you'd want to use this over competing services like Goodreads or Library Thing.

Shelfari, a small book sharing startup, was acquired today by Amazon (an existing investor in the company). Shelfari is known for its innovative user interface, something which we've discussed a few times on ReadWriteWeb. Shelfari's competitors include GoodReads and LibraryThing. The relationship with the latter has been frosty, with LibraryThing writing on its site today that Shelfari is a "clone" and that it is "somewhat less intellectual, less featureful", among other barbs.