Social curation finds an audience: Pearltrees reaches 10M pageviews. With its slick visual interface for bookmarking content, Pearltrees is unique enough that I’ve been both impressed and slightly skeptical that a mass audience will actually use it.
But it looks like the site has found plenty of users. The French startup just announced that it crossed two big milestones in March: It has more than 100,000 users curating links, and it received more than 10 million pageviews. Not only does that show the concept is resonating, but it also suggests Pearltrees could reach the scale where it can build a real business around advertising or by offering premium accounts for publishers. When you share links on Pearltrees, they show up as little circles called Pearls. (The site can also automatically add links that you share on Twitter.) Pearltrees lands $1.6M more for social discovery on the Web. Pearltrees, a social tool for discovering and organizing Web content, has announced it secured a second round of funding for €1.3 million (US$1.6 million).
The funding will be used to expand globally, especially in the US. Pearltrees is a free online social network that allows users to tag (or “pearl,” in the site’s parlance) content on the Web and share it with others who have similar interests. Users create pearltrees which house the individual pearls, or pieces of content, so that you can keep them all in one place. Behind the Scenes with Pearltrees #tg09.
« MobileGlobe's Yoann Valensi on Cheap Calls #tg09 | Main | Pavlov and the Crepe » December 17, 2009 Behind the Scenes with Pearltrees #tg09 The video clips take a deeper look at Pearltrees from behind the scenes with Patrice Lamothe at their Paris office last week.
The second video is with Francois Rocaboy about how and why they got started. Below is a shot taken of some of the engineers and product masters behind the machine.