<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, abebooks]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, abebooks]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/abebooks http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/abebooks <![CDATA[The spam-happy history of Amazon.com's new social network Shelfari]]> Amazon.com's newly acquired book-readers social network, Shelfari, has a bad reputation. The main charges lodged: It has grown its userbase through a shady techniques such as automatically sending site invites to everyone in a new user's email address book. It's also believed to engage in "astroturfing" —- specifically, pretending to be users in blog comments to buff up its image. Gawker last year described the site as "basically social networking rapists" — a perhaps inelegant phrasing, but one that gets the point across.

Shelfari CEO Josh Hug — how can you dislike a man whose last name is "Hug"? —blamed the whole mess on "an unexperienced but well-meaning intern." Ironically, the company that exposed Shelfari's tactics was rival books social network LibraryThing. AbeBooks, a recently acquired Amazon.com subsidiary, owns 40 percent of LibraryThing. Who will be motivated to report on Shelfari's user-gathering tactics now? Oh, right — that would be you, gentle reader!

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