Sometime ago I was looking for an online service to catalog my books, CDs and DVDs. I even posted on JoS forums, but no-one pointed me anywhere useful (people mostly complained that we don’t really need another social application).
The good news is that I found LibraryThing and well, it is another social application. It even uses ajax, tag clouds and all that ;-)
Although it only handles books, it does so very well. It has great importers, good search capabilities and a great layout. You can have either a private or a public account (in which case anyone can surf your collection). Very impressive work, well done!
The other interesting fact, is that this is NOT a free service. You pay $10 per year or $25 for life, otherwise the free account only lets you manage 200 books. It has 28.000 users and 2.000.000 books. The mISVer behind it is Tim Spalding and he keeps a very interesting blog. He has many great posts on the problems he faced when the time came to scale his application (read the comments too).
As an alternative you could try… Open Media Lending Database
You could setup OpenDB on your own site, to catalog books, DVDs, CDs, etc. You only need to enter the ISBN numbers and it’ll populate your database from Amazon, etc. Probably not as nicely designed as LibraryThing but it works well.
Comment by Glenn — March 23, 2006 @ 23:37
Looks interesting, but certainly not as easy to use as LibraryThing. It took me a bit to find out how to add an item!
Comment by Dimitris Giannitsaros — March 24, 2006 @ 00:15
Hey, thanks for mention, and cheers from one web-based ap developer to another. Just remember, we are the future ;)
Comment by Tim Spalding — March 24, 2006 @ 01:25
You are welcome Tim! The more I try LibraryThing the more I like it. Congratulations on building a useful and fun application.
Comment by Dimitris Giannitsaros — March 24, 2006 @ 01:34