I think I'm going to start cross-posting to my personal blog. I own a review site but I keep that for strictly formal reviews and I'm not the only one posting there... I don't get much use out of my Wordpress site but this will encourage me to start using the reading and following features that I've only poked at once in a while.

What do you think of starting a thread to share our off-BL blog urls?

Reply to post #1719 (show post):
Themis, their venture capital group is called SpeedUp Venture Capital Group:

http://speedupgroup.com/en/companies

I don't know about starting my own blog - I really want a book database attached; a way to shelve books, read dates, etc.

I need to start playing the lottery, then start winning the lottery, so I can build my own BookLikes. :(

Reply to post #1725 (show post):
Ah, OK, thanks (and great research, once more).

From their "Funds" page:

"We invest in companies in exchange for stakes we'll want to sell when the time is right. We invest with a 3-8-year perspective, and our exit strategy is based on selling our shares to another investor from the industry, managerial buy-out, or initial public offering. As a venture capital fund, we take the risk and we realize that many of our investments won't make it, hence, we expect a more than average investment return from these few which will manage to grow."

And:

"Each of our portfolio company cooperates closely with, at least, one of our Partners, who shares his business knowledge and expertise with them during the team meetings."

So do we conclude SpeedUp has decided that anything beyond a 3-year perspective is off the table and, oh, by the way, this is one of the many companies where their investment isn't paying off after all? (Otherwise, given that they're saying they work "closely" with their target companies, they'd presumably be pushing for much more active involvement on Dawid and Joanna's part behind the scenes??)

I'm ruminating on a few "what if" scenarios for this community -- off to bed now, but may be back with some ideas tomorrow. (Don't expect I'll be reinventing the wheel, but anything is better than inertia ...)

Reply to post #1726 (show post):
I don't know; I sincerely hope not. Putting myself in SpeedUp's position, I'd be rather reluctant to give up on it given the momentum BookLikes built in the first two years (and it's been three years since inception - give or take - only 2 with a database, and only 6 months since they've failed off the radar). BookLikes won a few awards at the start, got international exposure, and until the end of 2015 were cruising sustainably.

I wonder if something happened in D&J's personal life that has knocked them off track a bit (related to moving to Berlin)? Whether or not they get back *on* track without giving up on BookLikes is unknowable. In fairness, if something personally derailing was happening to me, I wouldn't share it with strangers either. But I'm just idly speculating...

But if they really do have partners at SpeedUp who are closely involved - if you were that partner and had a chance to see what this community is saying and seeing how deeply invested the community itself is, you'd be crazy to give up on your money and write this site off. Wouldn't you?

I'm likely the most cynical person on earth in terms of business potentials, but even I see how much BL could do to take a chunk of the GR market away from them.

Reply to post #1728 (show post):
Well, we're all speculating of course, but it strikes me that BookLikes's meteoric rise is so closely tied to the three-year minimum period mentioned on SpeedUp's website, as is the sudden near-complete withdrawal by pretty much the entire heretofore established BL team once the 3-year period was gone and done.

And surely if Dawid and Joanna's move to Berlin would mean something good for the site we'd have heard about it -- so yes, also given the tone of Dawid's response to the question about their move (though that of course may be down to translation), there may be some rough weather associated with that move.

Alright. Really off to bed now ... ;)

Seems to be running a lot faster for me right now. Anyone else?

Yes, it's back to being fairly snappy here too. The real test will be when I do some librarian edits, but this is VASTLY better than the weekend.

It's pretty swift for me too at the moment.

Faster for me, too. Until ... the next thing happens and we have to gang up on them yet again to get it fixed? Oh, well.

I'm happy that the site seems faster, but has anybody actually heard from a Booklikes employee yet? I'm still stunned that their response to people posting on their Facebook wall was to shut off Facebook wall comments. I'm just thankful that, so far, they haven't shut down this discussion group. It's not as embarrassingly public, I guess.

Hey, if any of you BL folks are listening, all this wild speculation you've been seeing in this discussion group could be dealt with (or at least lessened) by bringing back communication with the site as a whole. We know you can push out posts to everyone on the site, because you used to do it on a weekly or monthly basis. That was great, please bring that back.

OK, now it's worse than last Friday. Could only get here to Bug Reports by following a notification of Charlton's post.

Great letter, Charlton - I hope someone at BL gets it and reads it.

I'm not having a speed issue. At least not any worse than yesterday. *knocking on wood*

It's been really slow for me for a week or more, but most are finding it faster again? Not me.

Reply to post #1736 (show post):
Great letter.

I would add that -- not only in light of continual goodreads changes alienating their readers -- since staff were last officially heard from here, several competing book sites have shut down (including Shelfari, BookRabbit and Leafmarks) whose members were looking for a new home. Joining issues, suspicious lack of staff involvement (which definitely make Leafmarks and BookRabbit members leery of joining), ... not making booklikes very attractive.

Lack of staff response to anything or any staff activity/participation here plus assorted rumors about company being sold and staff losses -- your existing members are very nervous and having to look elsewhere to see where their main book community could be when booklikes ends.

And while we're very unhappy that the export option we were promised three years has yet to appear -- it's not like that would stop the migration to a new community since if booklikes shuttdown completely withiut the export feature we still wouldn't have an export feature. In fact, some might feel we need to start up on several sites now while we still can at least see our booklikes content to manually move it over.

Please be professional enough to do us the courtesy of letting us know what's happening and if booklikes is going to continue to be a viable site or not.

Keep in mind, many of your members here are the same members that grew goodreads site and book catalog to the behemoth it is today -- maybe we'd be more involved with booklikes and librarian edits if booklikes would be more engaged with us (even if not at the every Thursday levels back when you were trying to entice us to make booklikes our new home). We can grow another site; we'd rather stay here. Just a little communication would go a very long way.