Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0
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 site is tightly integrated with a Firefox add-on for creating "pearls".
The idea sounded intriguing, so I decided to take the site + add-on combo for a spin. Since the site itself is so visual, I documented the tour in a series of screenshots which you can see after the jump.
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 thumbnail is a static image, of course. The UI is a bit tricky, in that I was unable to make the thumbnail reappear later on; clicking a pearl just takes you to the site.
The add-on creates three buttons next to your address bar. Three is a bit much IMHO, but that's what you get. Here you can see the bookmarking button. As I said, the service is in its infancy, and it's French, so that may explain the interesting English wording on various UI functions. You can "put directly your pearl" either in a specific location or in a "drop zone" (which we will visit in a moment).
The add-on exposes its settings via a weird "Options" menu. This is really non-standard Firefox UI; see how they made the "cancel" and "OK" ("ok" actually) labels. Horrible! This just breaks Firefox UI conventions and is confusing for users. It's one thing to make your application unique; it's quite another thing to flaunt UI conventions and ignore how things are done on your platform of choice. So while I can forgive the confusing UI labelling ("Pearl your browse"? I can't even figure out what that means), ignoring design conventions isn't a language problem.
This is another screenshot of the UI, because I just couldn't resist the spelling. You can Pearl a page and "twitt" it at the same time! Awesome. Seriously, how hard can it be to spell-check your UI? "Tweet" is a just an English word.
Here's another view of the canvas, right after I added Download Squad to my pearls. I can drag it around!
Here's another screenshot, just to show you guys this is Flash-based. This app would be an obvious choice for HTML5, but for some reason they went with Flash.
Your canvas can get quite large, so you can cruise around in it. You can't zoom in and out, though. The UI is really not much to look at, in general. TheBrain has a much nicer-looking UI, and it's been around for years.
This is the bottom bar of the canvas. You can see the dropzone with the DLS pearl sitting in it, before I linked it to the rest of the tree.
One irritating feature is the persistent bottom bar. When you click a pearl to go to its site, you still get a bottom bar which is Flash-based.
Back to the canvas; this is the "Events" area, which I presume you can see new Pearls added by your friends, etc.
One nice (and essential) feature is the Delicious import facility. You feed the system with your Delicious username and password, and it imports your bookmarks.
And here's what my bookmarks looked like. And this is basically why this tool would never work for people who actually bookmark stuff. How can this be better than simple filtering by tags or dates? Note that I cannot link one pearl to two "source" subjects; each can have only one parent.
Bottom line: If you are really, really into visual bookmarking, I guess you can consider this service. Otherwise, feel free to give it a pass; and serious bookmark aficionados certainly need not apply.
Screenshot tour: Pearltrees tries to be graphical Delicious of the future; fails originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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