A few weeks ago, I met Patrice Lamothe who showed me his newest product, called Pearltrees which I found had a pretty interesting and different interface.
Just what is Pearltrees? According to the company’s website, it lets you organize the web in a way that you want. Once you start, you’re going to be able to discover some new things that you may not have been aware of. If you imagined there being a social bookmarking tool that followed the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” methodology, then Pearltrees is probably the closest thing to it. What’s perhaps the most interesting about this type of social bookmarking is that it’s not a popularity contest like Digg or an online database like Del.icio.us. Instead, it’s more visual and you’re able to sort through your bookmarks and eventually embed them right into your blog and websites.
To accomplish this, Pearltrees allows you to first have Pearls and Pearltrees. With pearls, these are things like websites, interesting pages, people, etc. Pearltrees are more like buckets and categories that you would lump pearls of similar interests in. So if you’re trying to aggregate a list of websites that all center around Japanese automobiles, then the pearltree would be called something like “Japanese autos” and the different brands and information about different models would be the pearls.
As you can see in this image, the interface of Pearltrees is somewhat unique. Instead of a list, Pearltrees has given us a more visual interpretation to show us how everything is connected. In essence, it truly is a tree structure – pointing how things lead from one thing to another. And in this same manner, other users are also allowed to “pick” the pearls from your tree and insert it into their own pearltree themselves.
What makes Pearltrees even more remarkable, beyond its non-conforming design, is that it focuses on the content, NOT the people you know. I’m thinking that it’s pretty standard that the first thing that we seem to be doing when we sign up for new accounts is that we want to find our friends on that social network in order to continue a relationship. Instead, Pearltrees lets you look for people or items through their search parameters but doesn’t let you automatically “add” them to a buddy list. In fact, the traditional form of the buddy list has all, but disappeared. You can, however, take that user’s main “pearl” and add it to a pearltree you create that will contain all your friends you find on Pearltrees.
One thing that I took away from my visit with Patrice Lamothe is that he mentioned that Pearltrees was something where you could discover new stuff easily rather than finding your friends. Just sign up for an account and on one of the screens, you’re able to find a pretty good sampling of people you may or may not know and the pearls that have been saved and added to the global database – ripe for the picking. And while you may think that it can’t be as addicting as Del.icio.us, then think again. There are tools that are available online to easily allow you to create a pearl of any website you’re on instantly and then you can add to your pearltree. The amount of clicks you should take to accomplish this? About 2-3.
Pearltrees is currently free to use and open to anyone who wants to set up their own account. Users can also comment to one another on a specific pearl or pearltrees – this thread is also pretty easy to account for. Once someone has also “picked” your pearl, Pearltrees will show you who is also using that pearl so you can either explore what they’re finding interesting or you can link to their friends and discover new things as well.
It’s definitely not a RSS reader like Google Reader or even a URL shortener. In my opinion, it’s more closely aligned with being a social bookmarking tool. Will this visual representation pave the way for more sleek looking technologies? How will Del.icio.us, Digg and Technorati come back to combat the very compelling visual design of Pearltrees? Should we also be looking forward to more social networking integration from Pearltrees? I’d definitely be interested to see how this startup progresses.
Here’s a demo video from Pearltrees explaining how it works:
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