I love http://­goodread­s.­com very much. It has mea­sur­ably im­proved my life as a read­er. I have read au­thors I would­n't have read with­out it, books from those au­thors I would have ig­nored, and keeps track of what I read, am read­ing and will read.

What it has nev­er been for me, is a so­cial net­work. I would be about as hap­py with it if I knew noone else on the site, if it were just me and a bazil­lion strangers whose taste I can leech of­f.

Sure, I have a few friends there nowa­days, but I hard­ly ev­er do any­thing "so­cial" be­yond ac­cept­ing re­quests and post­ing re­views which I have no idea if some­one read­s.

I love Flickr where I put most of my pic­tures (soon: all of my pic­tures). It's cheap and I can up­load an al­most in­fi­nite amount of pics there, and I can share them with friends and fam­i­ly some­times (by re­post­ing them to face­book).

They were even kind enough to store the pic­tures I up­load­ed as a free us­er un­til I paid for the space to store them 5 years lat­er.

I love Twit­ter be­cause it's a place to post short things that don't de­serve a blog post, to chat­ter with friends and not-­so-friend­s, to know more peo­ple, and to waste some time ev­ery day.

One of those things is not like the oth­er­s. One of those things I use for its so­cial fea­tures, the oth­ers I use for oth­er rea­son­s, and I don't re­al­ly care about them be­ing so­cial or not.

I think nowa­days, for a so­cial net­work to suc­ceed, it has to cater to the an­ti­so­cial, at least at first, when you know noone there. I don't go to Flickr to de­bate. I don't go to Goodreads to chat. I go there to put pic­tures and keep my books straight. And that's what kept me there long enough to meet peo­ple.