Today I was asked by my book club to join GoodReads. Trying to circumvent the tedium that is part of new membership, (having to enter in every book I ever read), I turned to Facebook. I had already gone through the mind-numbing exercise of finding past readings with iRead, the Facebook application, so I expected I could save a ton of time simply exporting that list and import it into GoodReads.

I was wrong.

While there are forum discussions praising the idea of adding an export feature to iRead, it has not been added. So, while you can import a book list into iRead, you cannot pull your list back out. The same is true for another library listing Facebook app, Visual Bookshelf.

But this is not apps behaving badly, this is how Facebook rolls. Don’t believe it? Just try getting finding a way to print or even get a copy of a photo someone tagged of you in Facebook. It cannot be done.

I am typically a strong advocate for Facebook, but I find it exceedingly frustrating that what goes in cannot come out.