Pearltrees Beta Launches on Wednesday: Will Let You Archive the Links You Share on Twitter At this year's LeWeb conference, Pearltrees will launch the beta version of its bookmarking and curation service. In this beta, Pearltrees will introduce some interesting features for Twitter users. Starting Wednesday, Pearltrees users will be able to connect their Twitter accounts to the service. We got a chance to discuss Pearltrees and its upcoming launch with the company's CEO Patrice Lamothe in the startup's Paris offices today. Thanks to the new Twitter feature, which will put all of the links you share on Twitter into a drop box on Pearltrees, you can now easily create a complete archive of all the content you share. Also Coming This Week: Real-Time Updates Starting on Wednesday, Pearltrees will not just allow you to import links from Twitter, but the service will also be able to send out alerts to your Twitter friends when you update your own pearls. API Coming Soon
TechCrunch (Build 20100401080539) Curation Startup Says It Captures 10,000 Links a Day French startup Pearltrees offers a very unique interface for organizing and sharing collections of links from around the web. Tomorrow the company will release a new, faster version of its application and announce that it has passed 2 million links curated in 7 months since going live. That means an average of 10,000 links have been bookmarked in Pearltrees every day since launch, and presumably many more now that the site has grown. Last month the company announced that it raised $1.6 million in venture funding. I love what Pearltrees is trying to do, most people I talk to love the idea, and it's good to hear the service is getting so much traction. It's hard to know what percentage of those thousands of links are pulled in automatically from synced Twitter accounts. What do you think about Pearltrees? Have you found yourself using the service regularly, though? The interface still just isn't quite there for me yet, though.
Pearltrees: A Design Interface for Remapping the Web It's rare to look at a bookmarking tool and feel convinced that it's going to win a design award. Pearltrees is such a product. The French site offers us a new way to explore and contextualize the web. Said Lamothe, "We wanted a type of game play that was playful to use and map the web...and the fact that you can group and ungroup content easily means that you can re-catalogue it and keep it current." Rather than looking at the web as a series of linear pages, this service lets us build tree graphs of connecting arguments, share them and then break them at any time. Naturally, as a newly anointed God of information, other great thinkers will gravitate towards you. The Future of Touch Interfaces Given the unique user interface of Pearltrees, Lamothe expects that the company will roll out feature releases and enhancements on an ongoing basis. At this point, I almost fell out of my chair thinking about the possibilities.
Collect, Process and Share Your Online Research with Trailmeme Social bookmarking sites like Delicious are useful for collecting bookmarks, but they don't allow users to really draw connections and tell stories. That's where curation-focused services like Pearltrees and Trailmeme come in. Trailmeme, which we first looked at in December, was incubated at Xerox and launches at DEMO this week. It allows users to bookmark sites and then organize them in tidy diagrams, making it easy to highlight the relationship between different items and for readers to browse these links. While Pearltrees only allows users to display connections in a relatively simple tree structure, Trailmeme offers its users more flexibility. Besides allowing users to create their own trails, they can also browse and search other users' trails. The company offers a toolbar for Firefox and a universal bookmarklet for creating trails, as well as plugins for WordPress and - in the near future - MediaWiki. A New Kind of Publishing Will Users Care?
How the iPad is Changing Interaction Design Applications that looked amazing on larger multi-touch experiences like Microsoft Surface may have a more affordable consumer-facing counterpart. While the iPad has been widely criticized, many startups are thrilled by its possibilities. In mid-November we featured Paris-based Pearltrees as a new design interface for remapping Web information. Pearltrees is a new way of organizing information where users create mindmap-style visualizations of their favorite websites and Web-based media. Says Lamothe, "The idea of physically touching and moving items on a screen is in the DNA of Pearltrees. Nevertheless, while Lamothe sees the potential in the tablet's touch interface, the fact that the device does not currently support Flash is a problem for the CEO. Says Lamothe, "I believe tablets can open up an entirely new field, something I would call 'casual browsing'.
Never Mind the Valley: Here's Paris If you're capable of seeing past the old stones of Paris and the picturesque rural villages, you'll realize that France is every bit as technologically advanced as any other Western country - more so in some areas. Not only does the country have a higher percentage of homes with high-speed Internet than the U.S. (plus it's faster and costs half as much), it ranks first in the world for number of blogs per Internet user, and has a formidable market of Internet consumers who spent €5.5 billion online in the first quarter of this year. When I came to Paris in 2006, I had a well-developed idea for a startup and nothing else. Pamela Poole is a blogger, translator and tech writer, and founder of Francophilia.com, a social startup for Francophiles. There's a thriving geek culture in Paris, and no lack of software development expertise, thanks to superior universities that produce superior engineers. Want to start up in France? The Big Players Incubators, Accelerators, Competitions The Funding
Elgan: Why bookmarking is obsolete Opinion June 19, 2010 07:00 AM ET Computerworld - Since the Web first came online in 1991, it has grown and improved beyond anyone's predictions. Unlike the gray background, mono-spaced text and ugly graphics on the Web in those early years, today's Web is rich with video, interactive applications and other useful and distracting goodies. But even after all these years, the way we find, navigate and save content on the Web works pretty much like it always did. Here's a page with text. But now there's a conspicuously innovative new option. The service is functionally similar in some ways to social bookmarking sites, but its core function is "curation," which Wikipedia defines as the "selection, preservation, maintenance, and collection and archiving of digital assets." Described by one blogger as a social bookmarking tool based on "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," Pearltrees looks a bit like Google's "Wonder Wheel," but it isn't used the same way. Maybe you follow several sports.
Bookmarks: Soon Obsolete? - PCWorld Since the Web first came online in 1991, it has grown and improved beyond anyone's predictions. Unlike the gray background, mono-spaced text and ugly graphics on the Web in those early years, today's Web is rich with video, interactive applications and other useful and distracting goodies. But even after all these years, the way we find, navigate and save content on the Web works pretty much like it always did. Here's a page with text. Some of the words are hyperlinked, so when you click on them, you open another page. But now there's a conspicuously innovative new option. The service is functionally similar in some ways to social bookmarking sites, but its core function is "curation," which Wikipedia defines as the "selection, preservation, maintenance, and collection and archiving of digital assets." Described by one blogger as a social bookmarking tool based on "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," Pearltrees looks a bit like Google's "Wonder Wheel," but it isn't used the same way.
PearlTrees: Swing Between Related Content Like Tarzan | Design & Social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon or Delicio.us are great for finding interesting, quirky content. But the hunt is on for something better. One example: The just-launched PearlTrees, which allows you to lump and organize your links into network graphs. The best bit is that when you create a node in your network (a "pearl"), you can see who else has bookmarked that same link--and see what they've tagged as related content. A short video explains: You might have noticed that startups like these are reaching a fever pitch--In recent weeks we've seen this Twitter visualization tool and Nebul.us, which does much of the same work as PearlTrees, with a more robust (albeit complex) visualization system. The logic seems hard to fight: Think about how easy it is to get lost in all the content flying around on Digg or Stumble Upon. The question is: Who can build their network the fastest? [Mashable via Infosethics]
Pearltrees is a Site to Share Information & Interests Pearltrees is a site that enables you to submit pearls which are websites, into a pearl tree. The unique concept of this website is to meet others with the same interests, and to locate similar topics of interests. Creating pearl trees is a personal choice of topic such as work, videos, or even an environmental pearl tree. When you use the search tool, you will be led to pearls that you are looking for. Submitting pearls can be done quite easily by downloading the toolbar for your browser. The visual concept of this web application is to view your interests in a design similar to a tree, and each pearl is a leaf. When you click on the pearl, another screen appears. When you right click on your pearl, you can rename it, share it, or delete it. At the bottom of the screen rests a bin so you can dispose of pearls or trees you are finished with or wish to change. When another user submits the same pearl, you will eventually be connected to that user.
3D PERSPECTIVES » Blog Archive » My Grandmother’s Pearls Ain’ I’ve never been in the same room with so many Internet stars and CEOs. Even a Queen and French Minister were there! Yep, I’ve been entranced by LeWeb09 for the past two days. This is Europe’s #1 Internet conference hosted by the Le Meur couple. There are MANY pearls to share, but it’s late so I’ll start with my favorite: pearltrees. If Twitter is the Web’s nervous system, pearltrees is its memory. Remember that. This little video will explain more, but then I’d like to share some thoughts about pearltrees and see what you think. Thought #1: Enfin! Thought #2: Ok, this is for PEOPLE to organize their own WWW, but the possibilities for COMPANIES using social media and wanting to track certain topics and projects are great! Thought #3: I’ll bet CAD and 3D folks would enjoy and get value out of organizing 3D models and scenes as pearltrees. Three thoughts are largely sufficient after two days at a conference. Wait, one more! The answer I got was part function, part poetry. Now how’s that for heavy.