GoodReads "alternatives", petty? (sorry)
There's always those tiny things that send you into an absolute frenzy of almost-righteous fury with hardly any provocation, isn't there...
It drives me crazy when I see various app developers saying their app is an alternative to GoodReads when the app in question is wildly different than GoodReads and doesn't have nearly half of what GoodReads does.
Y'all, it's FINE! Your app is awesome and does great things and provides a fantastic service, but it is NOT a GoodReads alternative!
GoodReads allows you to:
1) Search for books,
2) Categorize them for yourself (whether you own it or not),
3) Record & share your thoughts about and progress on those books, and
4) See & interact with other peoples' thoughts
At the VERY LEAST!
Challenges, forum-like conversation hubs, book recommendations, support for non-book content, and author/creator announcement hubs are great additions, but if you're missing the core, you don't have a GoodReads alternative!
GoodReads "alternatives", petty? (sorry)
Maybe to help my mindset with this flare-up issue I have, I need to start being ok with the term "alternative" for something different that someone *could* use *instead* rather than think in terms of them being a *replacement*. I'm looking for (and trying to build) a GoodReads *replacement* rather than just an alternative.
Even if other GoodReads alternatives out there can start adding just the core GoodReads features I mentioned before, then they can go much further as replacements, but until then, they add single bits and pieces of GoodReads functionality that must be recreated piecemeal without interaction between the platforms and that's annoying and not useful...
GoodReads "alternatives", petty? (sorry)
@Alamantus That's part of why I ask folks "what do you use this for" or "what are three primary features you really like about this application" to tease out those verbs. That's something I wish more folks did before thinking that "Car" is a synonym for "transportation", or that "be closely compatible with X at the bug level" is the same as "import documents from X".
GoodReads "alternatives", petty? (sorry)
@Alamantus Having been recommended a lot of "synonyms" for various platforms and applications I completely sympathize with this.
Folks see different verbs for different applications. "manage bookshelf" is one of the main things they see with something like Goodreads so anything from Calibre to Librarything to what-have-you can "manage bookshelf". It's when you get to the rest of the verbs of the application that you realize they're not synonymous.