There are dozens, if not hundreds of these sites out there. When I first started building a web-based barcode scanner component in Flash, it was with the intention of building one of these things; but there are simply too many people doing it already. They’re all dependant on Amazon for their revenue, so the writing is on the wall: Amazon sees the business opportunity for such an application (i.e. revenue driver, personalization driver, data acquisition), has bought the two main players, and will likely kill them and migrate the user base to its own internal offering.

To illustrate, weRead has 649,168 active users on facebook alone. In comparison shelfari has 9,507 facebook users, goodreads has 35,741, and librarything has 809. That’s a huge difference.

There’s a lot of competition in this space and in my opinion, the programs that are going to succeed will have to do so on existing social networks rather then try to exist as standalone websites. Just think- which is easier: getting your friends to create a new account at an unfamiliar website or getting them to add a facebook app? It’s far easier to add the app that works on top of a preexisting social network then to start building a new network from scratch, and this is why the growth of these programs will be largely based on their ability to work within social networks, and as far as that goes, weRead has a huge lead.

Your thoughts?