I'm an avid goodreads-user, mostly to exchange book-recommendations and find books to read via the recommendation-engine.

Some gripes with the page:

- people are too nice, every single book seems to have a 4/5 rating - with positive reviews to boot! I've read at least 5 shitty (not only shitty - but badly written, terrible characters, amateur work) books that had a plethora of positive reviews on goodreads. Weighted reviews, or weighting users' votes based on how much they vote might help.

- The recommendation-engine is quite conservative: I usually get books recommended that are insanely similar to the ones I like, or even from the same authors (or books that I've usually already read). I got around 160 books rated now. I don't get any far-flung recommendations, like, for example, "you seem to like freaky stuff (Cosmic Bandidos) so here's Ass Goblins of Auschwitz."

- and one issue Goodreads can't do anything about: Would be nice to have Kindle-integration to track reading-progress, right now Kindles (afaik) only have Facebook/Twitter-integration, which is useless to me.

Also interesting to see that the majority of users (I see) use their real names for their accounts, and I don't think goodreads actually enforces this. How did they do that?

The Kindle integration brings up an interesting issue, which is that Amazon doesn't seem to really be investing in the Kindle SDK. Last I used it anyway, it's not very powerful, doesn't give you any integration with books, access to the web browser, etc. And that's if you do get access to the SDK, I know devs who've had a hell of a time getting in, even with genuinely interesting ideas.

Of course there are privacy concerns, but it's the same problem that Android and iOS and solved well enough. Maybe they're worried about poorly written apps draining the battery? I think they're missing out on a huge opportunity. But another explanation would be that the current Kindle SDK isn't planned to last - maybe future eInk Kindles will run a watered-down version of Android?

Another point to add to this is that as far as I know, the Kindle Browser still hasn't made it past "experimental" state, and has been in development since the Kindle 3 (I think), without anything being changed or added.

Switching to Android seems more likely than pouring money into home-grown apps.

There's a site trying to aggregate professional reviews of books like Rottentomatoes: idreambooks.com.

Regarding names, it probably has something to do with the audience. You're going to have a more literate audience on goodreads than the general internet population.

I saw idreambooks when it was presented on HN - the search still seems to be broken, neither "Algernon" or "Flowers for Algernon" results in the actual book. And not a single results for "galaxy"? Weird.

And I don't think that the naming-policy is based on the audience being more literate - after all, I think most of the people complaining about Google Plus' naming policy were of higher-than-average intelligence. Maybe people are proud of showing off their reading skills?

Google plus was also a different audience. I'm not sure who these people complaining about Google+'s naming policy are.

But based on generalizations I'd say the average goodreads user is more educated. The average Google+ user would be a more internetty early adopter type (since Google+ doesn't really satisfy a niche interest except to be an alternative to facebook).

>> "Also interesting to see that the majority of users (I see) use their real names for their accounts"

I think this might be because of their Facebook Open Graph integration. From what I've seen (at least anecdotally) it is very popular on Facebook and with most sites when you choose to use Facebook log in it will start using your real identity.