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. In what looks like a mind map structure, users collect “pearls” (links to articles, videos and web pages) and drag and drop them to form a body of knowledge that folds and expands upon itself. 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. At this point, I almost fell out of my chair thinking about the possibilities.
Pearltrees Visualizes How You Organize the Web This post is part of Mashable's Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: Pearltrees Quick Pitch: Pearltrees is a new visual way to organize content on the Web and connecting people's interests. Genius Idea: How do you organize the web on the browser? Signing up for Pearltrees is simple, but getting used to the interface and all of its features is not as easy. Now for the organization part: you can create complex systems of pearls, known as pearltrees. Clicking on a pearl gives you a range of options that go beyond visiting your favorite website. Pearltrees takes a time investment to make it useful. Spark of Genius Series Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs.
media social et arborescence de bookmarks Pearltrees est un service qui propose de présenter vos bookmarks sous forme d'arbre et d'en assurer l'agencement par simple glisser-déposer d'une branche à l'autre. Il y a identité de but entre Pearltrees et Delicious, alors que le look de Delicious est beaucoup plus sommaire mais n'en présente pas moins de sérieux avantages de clarté. En effet Pearltrees souffre un peu de l'utilisation de l'arborescence, dont les branches, limitées à 25 au premier niveau, deviennent vite touffues et feuillues quand on se prend pour Diderot, ce que j'ai un peu tendance à faire. Les avantages sont dans la stratégie des concepteurs : Import du compte delicious Il faut faire un sérieux ménage dans les tags de delicious avant l'import car Pearltrees se sert de ceux-ci d'une manière assez heu ... indéterminée (je n'ai pas l'intention de recommencer l'import). Export possible au format RDF conforme au W3C ce qui en dit long sur l'esprit ouvert des créateurs. Synchronisation avec Twitter Mon avis personnel
Ubergizmo I am with the Traveling Geeks at Pearltrees’ headquarter in Paris, I already published about Pearltrees a few months ago when it was in pre- alpha, but the public beta will launch in two days at LeWeb. Pearltrees is a visual collaborative web browsing interface: users browse the internet visually using “Pearls” that represent websites and, by connecting them, they create a network of interest, I call it the “interest graph”. The social networking component, allows users to follow each other and use other people pearls to build their “interest graph”, they can collaborate to create a common tree with pearls shared among many people. With the Pearltress-Twitter sync feature users automatically build pearls by tweeting urls on Twitter, and automaticallt tweet urls by creating pearls in Pearltree, it will launch in two days. Ewan Spence asked an interesting question: what about the mobile version?
Pearltrees, the Social Curation Tool | Virtual Simplicity If there is one thing I like about koozies, that is their ability to become a unique and personalized gift. Regardless of where you will be handing them out, a koozie can be ideal memento for any occasion, whether it be for a get-together, corporate party, fundraiser, or a sports celebration. A koozie is a highly functional and innovative product recognized for its many uses. Personalized koozies are excellent souvenirs that can be handed out to guests to honor and perpetuate any occasion (i.e. reunion, weddings, birthdays, or other special events). Handing out custom imprinted items will surely be appreciated by your guests since they have a more personal feel to them. Read More Meet Pearltrees: Bookmarks with a social twist | Between the Lin A French Web site, called Pearltrees, is developing a Web service that is trying to bring a social networking element to bookmarking - but with the connections based on content instead of people. Think Facebook and Twitter mixed with one Amazon's recommendation system. You don't add friends in Pearltrees. Instead, you add links. As you come across something on the Internet that interests you, something that you might have otherwise bookmarked or tweet, you put it in your personal pearltree - which is really like a "main folder," that contain the links themselves, called "pearls." Here's the trick: if there are others on Pearltree who have also posted that same URL into one of their own pearltrees, you are now connected and can see their other links. The service, which is free, is still in alpha mode and has limited functionality and exposure. For now, it's a bit buggy but the concept is pretty solid.
PearlTrees better than bookmarking for organizing stuff online 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.
Venture Beat If you’re the type of obsessive-compulsive person who needs to organize the firehose of information confronting you every day on the web, then Pearltrees might work for you. It’s a visual social bookmarking service that allows you keep track of what you’ve read and establish relationships between different pieces of content. Using Pearltrees is like drawing a mind-map, but with online content. You can drag-and-drop content into a browser add-on or the service will automatically index links you share on Twitter. Then you can organize all of that content into a tree or a web of keywords like the picture shown above. Other people can follow, link or add to the trees you’ve built, so there’s a social element to the site. Pearltree’s approach involves a pretty unique user interface, and it will probably work better for people who think visually. Paris-based Pearltrees has raised 2.5 million euros from angel investors.
Screenshot tour: Pearltrees tries to be graphical Delicious of the future; fails Pearltrees is a fledgling social bookmarking service, which tries to break away from the tagging paradigm. Instead, each bookmark is a "pearl", and the pearls are linked into trees. You can see all of your bookmarks on a large Flash-based canvas, and drag them around. The idea sounded intriguing, so I decided to take the site + add-on combo for a spin. So here's the overview screenshot again, this time with a bit of an explanation: You can see the edge of the default "pearl tree" you get when you sign up, along with a thumbnail of a destination page (YouTube, in this case). The add-on creates three buttons next to your address bar. The add-on exposes its settings via a weird "Options" menu. This is another screenshot of the UI, because I just couldn't resist the spelling. Here's another view of the canvas, right after I added Download Squad to my pearls. Here's another screenshot, just to show you guys this is Flash-based. This is the bottom bar of the canvas.
Why You Can’t Help Believing Everything You Read | PsyBlog - Ice You shouldn’t believe everything you read, yet according to a classic psychology study at first we can’t help it. What is the mind’s default position: are we naturally critical or naturally gullible? As a species do we have a tendency to behave like Agent Mulder from the X-Files who always wanted to believe in mythical monsters and alien abductions? Do we believe what the TV, the newspapers, blogs even, tell us at first blush or are we naturally critical? It’s not just that some people do and some people don’t; in fact all our minds are built with the same first instinct, the same first reaction to new information. Descartes versus Spinoza This argument about whether belief is automatic when we are first exposed to an idea or whether belief is a separate process that follows understanding has been going on for at least 400 years. Descartes’ view is intuitively attractive and seems to accord with the way our minds work, or at least the way we would like our minds to work.
Matthew Buckland Fresh off the plane, I’m on the road with the Travelling Geeks, and the first startup on our schedule is an innovative Paris-based social bookmarking operation, Pearl Trees. Their founder and CEO, Patrice Lamothe, says the site offers users a new way to “curate” or organise their lives on the web. They’ve secured about US$3,5m in funding for what is essentially a type of visual social bookmarking site, offering a relatively unique drag-and-drop interface. The site, which has been in development for about 7-months, relies heavily on Flash. As far as I can see, it’s essentially a del.icio.us, but with a visual twist, offering a tree-like structure in which to categorise and store your bookmarks. The UI may appeal to some, but not to others. Pearl Trees is still in Alpha (0.4.1) and by Lamothe’s own admission it’s still early days. I find it interesting that the site offers no way for a user to search through his or her bookmarks.