I found this comment from Josh Hug in another blog post.
We actually just pushed an major update to our invitation system last night. Our small team has been slammed just trying to keep our site running recently. I apologize for not pushing the team to address usability complaints about our invitation system earlier.
Tim from LibraryThing has pointed out some aspects of Shelfari that were definitely broken and are now fixed. We’ll be blogging more details soon.
Can someone confirm that the system is fixed now? I deleted my account, so I cannot.
I can confirm they still have the deceptive little non-underlined hyperlink for "skip making friends for now" in place. I'm not about to let them anywhere near my address book to find out anything further, though.
Deanne (and anyone else following this story),
I just posted a detailed report about what was going wrong on Shelfari and how we fixed it last week. Please read it over and send me your feedback.
http://shelfari.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/11/invitation-desi.html
Thanks,
Josh
Shelfari hasn't "fixed" anything despite claiming to have addressed the problem.
The user interface still attempts to deceive, making the 'skip process' url grey and looking nothing like a clickable link as Dave pointed out above.
It still requires you to opt-out and checks all email addresses by default. Shelfari has stated elsewhere that sending to someone's entire address book "isn't what we really want". If so, why do they pre-select your entire address book then? Why refuse to change it when asked to by your critics? Shelfari expects good faith from its users while indulging in bad faith practices.
In short, Shelfari has sought to leave in place spam elements despite complaints. Worse, their supposed "redesign" consists of half-measures so that they appear to be doing something, but aren't really addressing all the issues.
So, forgive us for not trusting Shelfari - ever - again.
