My Critique of Pearltree 2.0
http://blog.pearltrees.com/?p=14719&cpage=1#comment-472294
Let me start by saying that I'm a premium member and will lose interest quickly if the new version is forced upon me. I get board very quickly by the grid layout, it does not interest me aesthetically or intellectuality and will not inspire me to build my pearl tree like I have, creating 10 000 pearls in five months with an average of 1000 views per month.
The old format worked and has been for me far better in terms of generating traffic than any personal website that I a have ever worked on. It is true that as the number of pearls on a node gets large that the new format may offer advantages. This is why it may be a useful supplement. However, I do not use pearltrees as purely a bookmarking tool. What interests me more is the connection between the links than the links themselves. I use it to see how ideas are related and the new version pales in comparison at showing me the structure connecting the ideas behind the links.
We are told that you can do everything in the new version that you could do before. This is not true. I cannot create a time line structure and quickly see related ideas to each node in the time line. As an example of such a structure, I mapped out a discussion on a philosophy forum, where each node of the trunck represeted key posts along the discussion and off these posts I branched off the links that interested me:
I cannot do this in the new version. The old version is also useful in mapping out key ideas from videos as I did with a talk by Chomsky on education:
and on the philosophy of mind:
The mind map of Chomsky's talk on the philosophy of mind allows me to quickly see what Ideas are covered in this talk and conversely that these ideas are related to this talk. In the new format these connections would be much less apparent and this would be especially so if I mapped out many sub branches.
The mind mapping is also useful for mapping out the ideas of lectures as I did with the Google python training class:
and other lectures/tutorials.
The mindmapps are also usefull at visualizing the structure of a website as I've done here with the website on Antenna theory:
As for sharing, I've been working on creating thermodynamic notes
Which extensively link to my pearl tree and a wiki that also links to my pearl tree nodes. The idea is that you can quickly go to a page by scanning the QR code. Then if you follow the pearltree link you can quickly see how the concept in the notes relates to other concepts.
We should not think of pearltrees as just static links in folders. Instead we should think of them as highly structured graphs of ideas (i.e. mind maps) which present to people much more than just the information contained in the links.
It is always a bad Idea to try to force major changes on paying users. Even for non paid services such as delicious drastic change has led to disaster. Microsoft for instance learned quickly the folly of removing the start button and ended up restoring it after user complaints. If you want to pursue grids that is find but I implore you to keep the old interface as either an alternative view or as a separate service. The new version of pearltrees or should I call it “pearl file folders?” is not the same type of tool and trying to force it upon people will alienate a large part of your existing user base.
Finally I would strongly suggest letting curators of their content set the default view for their pearl trees as either grid or mind-map based on their preferences. People than could either choose to navigate by curator defaults or by their own preferences. If a default is not set then the viewers preferences would dictate the view.