LibraryThing vs. Shelfari

So my initial thoughts to both of these sites was did I really want the world to know what I have been reading and why would anyone care? I read a lot of romance novels and it might be nice to find out what others are reading instead of just relying on amazon’s recommendations and my own shelf browsing. I like the idea of what each site does and think it is a great way to keep track of what I read. I thought the guided tour provided by LibraryThing great compared to the just browse feature in Shelfari. It is not completely clear what Shelfari is about. I did not like the fact that only 200 books were free and I would have to pay catalog the rest in LibraryThing. I know that I have a least 200 romance novels sitting on my shelf or in an excel spread sheet as marked “read.” I would exhaust my 200 book limit in one shot. Shelfari being completely free is more appealing in that respect. I had trouble with LibraryThing freezing when I tried the suggest screen. I also liked the cleaner appearance of Shelfari over LibraryThing as some pages on LibraryThing seemed to overpower the screen. LibraryThing provides a tag feature that appears to be specific to a particular section and browsing some of the clouds they are ridiculously large. Shelfari lists the most popular directly and then a user can look through what are called community tags for more narrow results. I am not particularly sold on either site. For me, I think it comes down to the fact that Shelfari is free and LibraryThing is not and that I would have room to develop my collection online beyond the 200 book limit.