Some of my friends prefer LibraryThing. Others may prefer Shelfari. But
I only network with those on Goodreads because that’s the service I
ended up using first. What a shame that I can’t see what my friends on
LibraryThing and Shelfari might be reading! I’d love to see a firm
commitment to cross-application connectivity, with the social network
as infrastructure rather than application. (O’reilly Radar)

I share his frustration. I’d add that there are in-network applications for facebook (and I assume other social networks) that could also stand to be integrated. Sharing information about yourself as a reader has a tremendous amount of social potential–recommendations, suggesting new contacts, lending arrangements, not to mention commercial opportunities. Partly because of these possibilities, different networks are vying to become the social network for books. This is bad for users but good for the winning site. The biggest downside is that lack of interoperability is anti-competitive. As I’ve been discussing with respect to facebook, making users select which social network to use based on which one most people are using is a disaster because it means the evolution of the dominant site need not be primarily about pleasing users.

If all sites were interoperable, they’d all be competing to offer the best features in order to attract users. If they remain seperatesd, they’ll all be trying to lock in as much of the user base as possible, forcing what’s left to follow the pack. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs and again, it makes one wonder just how accurate some of the more optimistic web enthusiats are in their proclamations.