Archive for 'France'
Pearltrees: A visual social bookmarking tool that has its own take on PageRank
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. (more…)
Traveling geeks intro video (LOL)
tags: Traveling Geeks
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The Real-Time Web – Indeed!
Unbelievable how much time it takes to keep a “live” blog functioning properly when you’re working with new software.
It’s after 1:00am and I’ve just finished wrestling with the day’s blog entries. Reformatting them to make them look better, and making sure that the feeds of more than a dozen geeks are coming in and being handled properly. (And here and there a little bit of editorial work.)
I’m afraid this is what is known as the Real-time web. [See LeWeb]Yahoo Pipes still saves me a zillion hours almost every day. I’m still monitoring 18 geek blogs in close-to-real-time and when a post is written that falls within certain limits, it has to be published. And it has to be published as close to real-time as possible. I have to review about half of these feeds and then approve the posts, but most are on “automatic” and the post is published on Traveling Geeks right away.
Yahoo Pipes is used in two ways in this environment:
First, for some of the geeks it monitors two or three blogs and mashes them together into a single feed, which is then examined, filtered, and goes to Traveling Geeks for possible publication.
Second, in some cases it takes the output of a Typepad blog (which produces a different type of feed/output) and massages it so it can be properly evaluated and processed by the WordPress software which lies under Traveling Geeks.
Without it, I would have been up until after 1:00am tonight.
Free report “Real-Time Search and Discovery of the Social Web”
Call it good or bad timing, but I just happen to finish a report on real-time search on the day that Google announced its rollout of its integrated real-time search results within its general search results. While I had to do some last minute edits, the report is done and I’m making it available to everyone for free. It’s entitled “Real-Time Search and Discovery of the Social Web.” You can download the PDF, or view it right now on Scribd.
I’m giving the report away for free. All I ask in return is some feedback. Positive, negative, but whatever it is, please make it constructive. I’m eagerly learning as much as I can about this subject. This is an area that I think is going to grow like crazy, and we’re only looking at a thumbnail’s worth of what is yet to come.
Here are some highlights from the report.
- Real-time search could steal away as much as $40 billion from traditional search. Google and Microsoft’s announcement to incorporate real-time search results is a good first step to prevent losses.
- The definition of real-time search is far more varied than the definition of traditional search. You’ll see more variations in what is considered a real-time search engine.
- All real-time search engines are far from equal. The major reason is they don’t index the same content.
- Real-time search engines that only index Twitter are missing up to 90 percent of the real-time web.
- One exciting new aspect of real-time search is the creation of real-time programming that will be complimentary and competitive with traditional programming (e.g. TV, radio, print, and online).
Enjoy and let me know what you think. David
December 10th, 2009 CORRECTION: The article mentioned that real-time search engine Wowd required a plugin for its use. That is not true. Current report is updated to reflect that it’s not required.
Real-time Search and Discovery of the Social Web
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Paris Diary: The International Geek Brotherhood…
[I’m in Paris all this week as part of the Traveling Geeks, a collection of journalists, bloggers, and PR people meeting with French startups and also attending LeWeb, France’s premier Web 2.0 developer and business conference.]
I took the EuroStar train from London on Sunday afternoon and in less than 3 hours I was in the middle of Paris. That trip always amazes me and it is so much nicer, (and greener) than flying.
When I arrived it was raining off and on but that didn’t matter because I was back in Paris after a ten year break.
I had to find my hotel, about a couple of miles from my terminus at Gare Du Nord but being short on cash I decided to walk in roughly the right direction, trundling my wheeled travel bag across cobble stone streets, and relishing being in one of the great cities of the world. (more…)
At Orange Labs, they’re showing off their latest tech #travelinggeeks
Sent from my iPhone
Pearltrees: Visual Collaborative Web Browsing Interface
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 Pearltrees-Twitter sync feature users automatically build pearls by tweeting urls on Twitter, and automatically tweet urls by creating pearls in Pearltrees, it will launch in two days.
Visual social bookmarking: Innovative, but will it fly?
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. It also offers a nifty, generously-sized real-time preview of the sites you have bookmarked.
The UI may appeal to some, but not to others. I’m in the camp of wanting simple UI and getting my bookmarks quickly (and del.icio.us and Google bookmarks does this very well for me). For me, social bookmarking sites are essentially utility sites, so its interesting that the creators of Pearl Trees went for this highly visual, more complex approach. In my opinion, simple interfaces and simple HTML sites may work better for utility sites such as these.
Pearl Trees is still in Alpha (0.4.1) and by Lamothe’s own admission it’s still early days. What they have achieved is impressive, considering its only been in development for 7 months.
I find it interesting that the site offers no way for a user to search through his or her bookmarks. Lamothe reckons users won’t need search as a result of the unique way they are categorising and storing information, although he later concedes its something they may look at. Search feels like a big omission: When my little Tree of Pearls gets busy, I’m going to need a way to access my bookmarks quickly via a search without excessive clicking. Also the heavy use of Flash seems like a barrier to entry to accessing the info quickly.
Pearl Trees also takes us back to a “real-world” hierarchical approach of organising information, which we know tends not to work on the web where information is endless, and you can’t predict what that information will be. So there are questions over how scalable their model is. In the future, as my Pearl Tree grows large — I may find myself constantly revisiting the hierarchy, trying to manage it, change it and remould it as new information pours in. (I don’t have the time to do this.)
Apart from Pearl Tree’s visual edge, which actually may be a inhibitor, I struggle to find how it differentiates itself from other social bookmarking sites? I guess it may boil down to what type of person you are: Someone who just wants the information or a visual person that enjoys bold UIs that may mirror a desktop experience of storing and filing data.
The genius of Pearl Trees may actually lie in the fact that it appeal to a broader type of user, and not the early adopter crowd. In many ways social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us haven’t really ventured very far outside the tech-savvy, early adopter markets. However lyrical I wax about them, my mother is unlikely to ever use these sites. However she may use something like Pearl Trees, because the UI will make sense to her: It looks and works like her desktop.
Pearl Trees is a good start, and I generally like their approach. I think they are on to something if their plan is to target a broader type of internet user, and I predict Pearl Trees will evolve quite radically (maybe into something else) as the founders continue to build, interrogate and innovate around their creation.
tags: Paris startups, pearl trees, social bookmarking
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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. Pearltrees will continuously scan your Twitter account and index every link you share on Twitter. Currently, shared links on Twitter are often quickly forgotten, but thanks to the new Pearltrees connection, you will be able to easily create an archive of all the links you have shared with your friends.
Sponsor
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Pearltrees: A Unique Way to Discover & Organize on the Web
Pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe meets us at the door of their offices on rue de charonne in a funky, artsy area of Paris that houses other early stage companies and ad agencies, not unlike San Francisco’s SOMA in many ways.
Coffee waiting? You betcha and hot chocolate too.
He’s not an unknown personality in Silicon Valley so some of us had heard of, tried, tested and demoed Pearltrees before. He knows this so he gets a little creative and we dig a little deeper into their service.
“Building an organization on the web touches on how you organize your stuff in the real world. If you like books, you will likely get a lot of pleasure organizing books into your own library on the web,” says Patrice.
Pause….a nearby church bell rings on the half hour. (Okay, so not quite like SOMA)……
Pearltrees allows you to get in touch with others who share mutual interests around the way you ‘organize yourself on the web.’ “Bookmarking and tagging alone doesn’t allow you to accomplish this,” says Patrice.
Visually it looks a bit like the brain……not unlike a mind map, but that’s not the point of the app, which is all done in flex btw. You can import files from delicious and export as RDF.
Coming out this week, any URL that you tweet will automatically turn into a pearl inside Pearltrees. Pearltrees in a sense becomes your ‘memory,’ allowing you to store useful data by category or by interest — all organized in your Pearl-Tree. (visually displayed the way you think and want to store and view data).
Who uses it? In France, a lot of art and political bloggers use it as a way to visually tell a story or drive people to the web around a particular topic or interest.
One third of their users are early adopter users who are social media savvy and one third are under thirty and mostly women from France and the U.S.
You can embed your pearls on Twitter, email Facebook or directly inside your own blog.
To-date, they have raised roughly $3 million. As for their revenue model? “Either through premium services or advertising,” says Patrice. Their cost per user is very very low however.
