I am interested in freemium business models, but that Pearltrees gadget was the most frustrating web experience I have had this year, once I got it to work. It really made me long for a nice synopsis of a few paragraphs, with neat hyperlinks to the relevant articles. It would have been very short, too, considering how few nodes there are in the map. In fact, in all the text it took him to explain how to use this map, he could have provided a better overview, using late-90's tech invented at CERN.
I was about to post the same thing - what is this PearlTree crap and why is it getting in the way of me and my information?
I know Scribd is a YC company and all, but this is just like it - reinventing the wheel and adding a thick layer on top of our interactions that nobody ever asked for.
How hard is it to write a few blog posts and place hyperlinks in them?
How did you get it to work? I got a screen that said "Loading" with animated dots. Left it 20m while reading other tabs and came back to the same thing.
I actually quite liked the Pearltree gadget, though I don't think it's elegant. It provides a linear guide through the set of content, whereas links and a summary don't provide such structure.
That said, as I think about it, I think a "Top 10 Articles on the Freemium Business Model" may have been better. Still thought the gadget was kind of nifty.
If you want structure, you can use a list of lists. Nothing wrong with repeating elements if you must. As it is (with a total lack of explanation), I have to guess why the articles are even chained together the way they are. This is particularly annoying because what I really want to do is just read them all.
Oh wait. Sorry. I see I'm supposed to hit 'Play' if I want an explanation. But why would I want to have to do that?!
Pearltrees works with flex so if you have a flash/flex blocker it may explain the issues to read it.
The big advantages of Pearltrees is that it makes it very easy for me a) to keep all the contents as I come across them, b) to organize them in a certain order and c) to share them with one link so as to guide others through those contents in the order I think subjectively is the one that makes most sense. As jessep points out, it does allow to organize these contents in a structured way which a list cannot do. Finally, I can discover other related contents done by other pearltrees' users on the same topic, (i.e., users that cross my map on a same web page notified by a yellow circle), and hence discover other point of views on the topic.
Of course the tool can be improved and simplified. The team is working hard on it and I'm sure it will get better. But it is already a very powerful tool for my everyday web usage.
I think it's pretty clear from the text above that I'm part of Pearltrees (not a tech guy though... hence "the team"). It's also clearly stated on my blog.
Some of the feedbacks above are very useful. There are bugs that we are working on to avoid some of the issues stated above.
