Goodreads.com is social cataloging service for books. In this post you will see how they’ve used the friend spam dark pattern, but how they’ve also failed to make it go viral. This makes it interesting to carry out a post mortem and work out what they should have done. Let’s take a look:
Above you can see where it starts. One of my twitter friends has tweeted about goodreads.com. I wonder what that is, maybe I’ll just click on the link…
OK now I’ve been taken straight to the Twitter oAuth page. There’s no warm up, no foreplay, they go straight for penetration. Twitter users are increasingly savvy, and it turns out this approach has been quite ineffective. If you run a Google Updates search, you’ll see this “viral” adoption campaign is only generating a few tweets a day.
As such, it’s evident the Twitter oAuth page is a crap landing page for their campaign. People are seeing it, thinking “Woah, that’s weird”, and then leaving. This is a GOOD thing for the Twitter ecosystem. The whole point of this page is that it should make people stop and think twice.
OK so let’s see what happens to those users who proceed:
Now I’ve clicked “Allow”, you can see I’ve been automatically registered and logged-in to Goodreads.com: a very slick implementation of lazy registration. Now let’s take take a close look at the page. All of the checkboxes are preselected, and the very bottom checkbox reads “Share goodreads with my 644 twitter friends who are not on goodreads yet.”
If you click “add friends”, the system sends out a bunch of emails on your behalf, and then uses your Twitter account to post a tweet. This is the friend spam dark pattern in action:
Goodreads simply don’t make it clear what will happen when a user leaves the “Share goodreads with my twitter friends…” checkbox ticked. The fact that it’s preselected and buried at the bottom of the page makes even more of a dark pattern. The only way a user can find out what’s happened is by looking at their own Twitter feed. This is naughty.
There’s nothing wrong with posting tweets for users *if* they know you’re going to do it. Twitter’s Application Developer Terms of Service expressly states “Don’t surprise users” and “Get users’ permission before: sending Tweets or other messages on their behalf. A user authenticating through your application does not constitute consent to send a message.”
So Goodreads are breaking Twitter’s rules, and it’s all down to the wording of that checkbox label. Let’s compare the goodreads “dark hat” pattern to the firstfivefollowers.com “white hat” pattern:
With firstfivefollowers.com, the user can clearly see what is happening. No room for misinterpretation.
So what are Goodreads up to? I think you’ll agree it looks more like clumsy design than malicious intent. It’s a double loss situation for them: they get their brand name associated with sleazy friend-spam practices, yet it doesn’t deliver for them. All they need to do is add a nice landing page, then use the firstfivefollowers.com white-hat design pattern and they’ll be home and dry.
Hmm, food for thought. I hope I remembered to uncheck that box as I don’t want to clutter up people’s stream – I reckon if they want to be on Goodreads they already are.
I found that Goodreads wanted to send an update to Facebook every time I added a book – which, as I was adding a lot at once would have been very tedious for people. Guys, you might like to uncheck that box too.
I signed up for goodreads a few months ago and didn’t run into any of these patterns. I wonder if they’ve added it recently to try to gain more users…
Dave, as far as i know goodreads is generally a good service, though they experiment with adoption strategies. Sometimes it goes a little wrong, like in this example…
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So apart from this, is the website any good? Sounds like something I’d want to use, I’ll just have to be careful not to step into an anti-pattern landmine.
I remember the “Share goodreads with my twitter friends…†checkbox when I signed up to Goodreads.
I’m so accustomed to shady checkbox defaults that I rarely miss them. The presence of one definitely alerts me to the possibility of additional unscrupulous site behavior.
So far I’m happy with goodreads on most other fronts.
I have used GoodReads for a while now and it seems to still be the best book-related service out there. That said, the pattern pointed out in this article is one of many failures they have made with regard to integrating social media. Here are two examples:
1. Friends are not automatically “followers.”
I have a small number of friends on the service, but when I first login, the topmost message is: “You have no updates from people you are following yet.” While it’s probably a result of the the sequence in which the site was programmed – and lack of forethought, separating friends and followers makes no sense, especially when Twitter shows how integrating the two can be done right.
2. They don’t make is easy to share things on Twitter and Facebook.
There is, at some point in the review writing process, a way to share that review. Once it’s done, however, there is a conspicuous lack of the standard sharing options. The best they have at the moment is a “blog this” option, where you can cut and paste a link to some other service. A button for sharing on Twitter and Facebook should be easy and obvious – as it is on way too many other sites that don’t need them.
Thanks for the post. Clearly we can make the copy on that checkbox more clear, and will do so by next Tuesday’s release. Apologies if anyone thought it was trying to be devious – it was just, as was mentioned, not fully thought out.
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