Jumpstart Your Platform

Many famous people have held an AMA (“ask me anything”) session—including President Barack Obama, Stephen Colbert, Ron Paul, and many others. President Obama’s AMA was so popular that the high amount of traffic shut down the website at times!

Sign-Up Process

To sign up for Reddit, visit www.reddit.com and click the Register link in top right. From here, create a user name, enter your email address and password, and hit enter (or click Create Account). Reddit is somewhat cryptic as to whether or not this process is as easy as it appears – trust us, though, it is! You don’t even need to enter an email address to register. Just choose a username and password, and you can get started right away!

Reddit is a content aggregator, which means that users can submit links to content on the Internet that they find interesting. Other users of Reddit can then vote these links up or down, giving a good idea of what is popular at any given moment. Users can also comment on links that have been shared, and there is a very large and active community of commenters on the website. There are also “subreddits” that focus on individual categories, such as Technology, Movies, Politics, etc. so that users can quickly find trending topics in any field they might be interested in. Any user can create a subreddit on the topic of their choice, and can even make that subreddit private, making team collaboration for special projects easy!

SOCIAL NEWS AGGREGATION

Who Should Use It

most popular. You can also check out featured lists. You can create your own list by using the Create a List link at the top, but it’s up to the Goodreads community to decide which titles will go on it!

Finally, readers aren’t the only ones who use Goodreads regularly. Authors (many of them quite famous) frequent the site as well, and you’ll have access to exclusive interviews, debut author snapshots and more.

Goodreads contains a number of highly entertaining extra features that make an account worth any bookworm’s while. Use the Explore menu at the top of the page to find extras like giveaways, trivia, quizzes and quotes. You’ll also a link to Listopia here.

Goodreads’ Listopia brings together crowd sourced lists in just about every genre, theme, and format. Listopia lists consist of titles that Goodreads users have voted for, making them more egalitarian than one or two reviewers’ best-of lists found elsewhere online. Lists on Listopia can be browsed by genre or

Exploring Books in Goodreads
Goodreads gives you several tools for finding something good to read. You can check out your friends’ shelves or use the Explore and Recommendations menus to find books you may have never heard of that fit your interests. You can also peruse other Goodreads users’ reviews under each title. You’ll find that they tend to be thoughtful and detailed (reviews with spoilers are hidden as a courtesy). If a review helps you, be sure to “like” it!

Other Features in Goodreads

You can link Goodreads to Facebook and Twitter to share your reviews and ratings with a much broader audience. To connect your accounts, visit your profile editing page and click on the Apps tab.

Goodreads will give you options for connecting to your Facebook, Twitter and Wordpress accounts, as well as instructions for installing the Goodreads mobile app on your phone.

Groups

Your Goodreads Profile
The Goodreads profile is fairly minimal; however, it will help your real-life friends find and recognize you on Goodreads, and it only takes a minute to fill out.

To edit your profile, click the downward arrow next to your profile picture (or the place holder image) in the top right corner. Fill out as much or as little as you’d like, and add a profile picture. You can tell Goodreads whether or not to display your last name, and several other fields have privacy settings built right in to the profile form.

Linking Accounts

Compare Books
One of the most fun features on Goodreads is the Compare Books feature. This allows you to see how your literary tastes stack up against other Goodreads users. See how many books you and your friends have in common, and how similar your tastes are. The Compare Books link appears next to each friend on your friends list, as seen below.