Reshared post from +Mari Smith

I activated my new online social profile on Amazon Kindle yesterday and suddenly peeps started following me. Aha, that's because when you hook up your Facebook and Twitter accounts, autofollow is turned on (meaning you automatically follow other connected Kindle users that you follow on Twitter or with whom you are friends on Facebook) and this automation cannot be deactivated. Hmm.

Still, one of the first peeps I noticed I'd autofollowed was +Paul Allen (founder of Ancestry.com + ten other companies!), who's super savvy and very active on G+. I can see at a glance that Paul has 83 books with public notes. Now, I love the saying, "all leaders are readers" so I'm actually rather excited about the fact we can all share what books we've read along with notes and highlights, plus books we're currently reading and those we hope to read. I think you can tell an awful lot about a person by the books they read. I'm a voracious reader and have a library at home containing over 600 print books (97% of which are nonfiction). I love physical books and like to annotate and flag. I have a smaller collection on my Kindle and really dig the fact that now I can go from my own world – limited to just me and the author – to the whole world by reading a book on Kindle, highlighting and annotating and sharing online with my networks. Yep, reading books is now a social activity!

Feel free to connect with me here:
https://kindle.amazon.com/profile/Mari-Smith/2143524 (not a very elegant URL for now, but oh well! I just made this redirect: http://marismith.com/amazon/kindle).

You can make your Kindle notes (from books you've read/are reading) available publicly or keep them private on a book by book basis. And, if you do connect up your Facebook and Twitter accounts, you can also opt to share your reading activity with your social networks. See the article below from RWW. At a high level, your Kindle Profile is focused on reading and your Amazon profile is focused on buying.

See also this Wired article for more details: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/08/amazons-newish-social-network-now-lifting-even-more-info-from-facebooktwitter/

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Amazon Brings Social Reading to Kindle – But Will You Use It?
Kindle Profiles is a social service that was quietly launched by Amazon in March of this year. Its existence was little known, probably because it wasn't very useful as a social tool until Amazon rece…

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