Readernaut is a new site for tracking what books you and your friends are reading. It’s a more beautiful LibraryThing with some super simple features.
Like most social sites, Readernaut gets more useful with more people using it. It helps if those people are your friends, or if you at least “follow” some users on the site. Then you can view a Facebook-like timeline of your friends’ latest Readernaut updates.
Social networks have long promised to connect you to new friends, though many tend to fail to deliver. Hyperlinked lists of “my interests” haven’t been the best vehicles for discovering people. One Readernaut feature that could help fulfill finding people is the list of other readers.
Discover others who are reading the same book, or people who enjoyed your favorite book. I’m more likely to bond with someone over a shared interest in a book than a shared interest in filling out online profiles. Plus, with the feature that lets users track how many pages they’ve read, you can find someone who is the same place in a book as you. Here comes ad-hoc, virtual book clubs.
Readernaut is in private beta, though site creator Nathan Borror says he’s letting people in quickly. Still, there isn’t quite the critical mass for the site to be as useful as it could be. The details that have been included now are pleasing. The interface is beautiful and desktop-like. My favorite: the logout button (visible in the lower left of the above graphic) is a power button.
Borror is busily adding features (and heck, there’s a public API), so we expect it will only get better. To hear more about this project, and all the other stuff Borror is doing at the same time, listen to Jeff Croft’s interview.
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