brightly colored food

One of my longstanding wishes has been for a personal lending library system. Not sure how well it works, but Mediachest, mentioned on BoingBoing today, is one of the first online efforts I’ve heard of. I’m curious to see how its used.

The visual design looks a bit Friendster-ish, which makes me both celebrate and cringe about standardization. As Neilsen points out (it’s hard not to call him Nielly now), users spend most of their time on other sites, not yours, so some standard visual conventions are generally a good thing. On the other hand, it’s ugly, and the only thing worse than one ugly design is an ugly design that’s becomg convention. Flickr was banged together in eight weeks and looks right nice. Some of the other social network services do a decent job as well (this is not going to turn into a design review), so I’m left hoping this is an isolated incident and not a trend.

Anyhow, the user agreement and privacy policy for Mediachest are understandable and seem reasonable at first glance (though it’s interesting: both list when they were last updated, which implies that they’re subject to some amount of change. I wonder if anyone tracks changes in agreements on sites like this).

So I signed up. The sign up was painless, didn’t ask me to disclose anything unreasonable, but the book submission process is laborious, as you’d expect: typing in the ISBN numbers off the back of books isn’t too exciting. And for the outward appearance of convention, navigating around to edit my profile took more effort than I’d expected.

Part of my thesis is on self-presentation: how and what people share about themselves. Browsing shared iTunes playlists over the network has become a bit of a thing on college campuses, so I wonder how this will compare. Unlike services like Friendster, my profile is visible to all. Though I can limit who views my booklist by groups (everyone and friends) and also by book, anyone can see what I’ve added recently, going against any of the permissions controls I’d just set up.

I grabbed 100 books off my bookshelf and added them to my profile. Curious guinea pig that I am, I’m still going to wait before putting the rest up. I haven’t really explored the groups or the specifics involved in sharing - no point until there’s more people - but I’ll post again if anything interesting happens.

Update: In a wonderful example of customer-centered design, it took less than an hour to get an email from one of the lead developers at Mediachest. We IMed about the visual presentation and site functionality, and they’re amenable to design suggestions (I gave him plenty), though overwhelmed with work. There are some nice functional improvements coming out soon, so I’m excited to see what happens.