Why Pearltrees glistens like the Na’vi Tree of Voices
Friday, January 15th, 2010
Early last year I was chatting to Le Laissez Faire, my go-to-guy for all things networked, about his vision for the web. He painted an alluring mental picture of a way to better track and store my web browsing, using network theory. A more visually appealing version of del.ici.ous is the simplest way to describe it. I think my response at the time was something along the lines of “Can I haz it now please”.
Sadly his entrepreneurial vision was held back by an energy sapping corporate restructure, and a heavy load of volunteer work already taking up his night hours.
But as with all ideas, there are no monopolies, and late last year along came Pearltrees, turning LeLaissezFaire’s vision into reality. You can read LeLaissezFaire’s review of Pearltrees here.
Pearltrees is a new way to organise and store the content you consume online. The visual elements of Pearltrees make it a vastly more intuitive way to bookmark your web browsing, particularly for people with a dominant right brain.
But Pearltrees goes beyond bookmarking to incorporate some interesting social elements and integration with other social media sites, including Twitter.
Some of the most valuable tools offered by Pearltrees allow you to:
Tag content as you browse, to be stored in a dropzone for later categorisation
How often have you been browsing some content and promised yourself you will come back to it later, only to get sidetracked with something else? Pearltrees offers an add-on that sits in your web browser and allows you to quickly tag, and if you like, categorise, any page you are browsing
Store and link out or embed stories on one hot topic
If you’re following all the stories on one topic, you can easily create a pearltree to store all the stories you’ve found on that topic. You can then link out or embed that pearltree, encouraging others to comment or contribute. For example, I recently did this for all the stories on Virgin’s plans to enter the banking market in the UK.
See what your friends and colleagues are browsing
Click on the “What’s connected” button in Pearltrees and you can very quickly and clearly see who is interested in similar content to you. Explore the trees a little deeper and you can start discovering content from like-minded people that you may not have stumbled across elsewhere.
Store the links you tweet in a more organised manner
By syncing Pearltrees with your Twitter account it can continuously scan your Twitter account and index every link you share on Twitter. Instead of losing track of what you’ve tweeted, you can store it more permanently on Pearltrees.
Be reminded of the hot topics the people in your industry are following
Without the added element of connection or reminders, del.icio.us quickly became stale for me. (Incidentally you can easily import your del.icio.us tags into Pearltrees). Pearltrees sends you an email when the people you’re connected to on Pearltrees add one of your content pearls to their tree. The pearls in Pearltrees also flash when your connections have added new content.
Pearltrees is still in beta, so can only improve. It takes a little time to understand the interface, and quite a bit more time to think about what you’d like to store and how, (no-one likes filing), but I think the end result is worth the effort.
Perhaps it may ruin the clean look of Pearltrees, and go beyond what the founders are trying to achieve, but I’d like to see the group add the ability for users to comment on the content that they have added to their trees, within the site.
Teamstream, an automated content collection tool from Wotnews, allows users to add notes to the end of stories, so their colleagues can get a better understanding of what they think about the content.
I wonder if it will actually lead us to discover more diverse content, or if it will act as an echo chamber?
I guess Pearltrees will only be limited by the imagination of its users. And if we think like the designers of Avatar, our trees will soon be looking ethereal.
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