French startup Pearltrees offers a very unique interface for organizing and sharing collections of links from around the web. Tomorrow the company will release a new, faster version of its application and announce that it has passed 2 million links curated in 7 months since going live. That means an average of 10,000 links have been bookmarked in Pearltrees every day since launch, and presumably many more now that the site has grown.
Last month the company announced that it raised $1.6 million in venture funding. I love what Pearltrees is trying to do, most people I talk to love the idea, and it’s good to hear the service is getting so much traction. I’m waiting until the promised iPad version comes out before getting too excited about it.
It’s hard to know what percentage of those thousands of links are pulled in automatically from synced Twitter accounts. Either way, traffic services report that thousands of people each day are visiting the Pearltrees site, probably between two and six thousand people in fact. That’s not a lot, but it’s better than a poke in the eye.
What do you think about Pearltrees? The unique interlocking trees-of-pearls interface sure is seductive. It’s part brand-new and part old feeling – it harkens back to many geeks’ fantasies of spinning links and sparkling orbs in their hands, like a contact-juggling, web-nerd, feed-reading version of the David Bowie character in Labyrinth. That’s a pretty high bar to reach!
Have you found yourself using the service regularly, though? The people we see who have stuck with it have curated some awesome collections of reading material – see deep-thinking journalist and company advisor Tom Foremski’s collections, for example.
The interface still just isn’t quite there for me yet, though. I want to touch it, spin it and use it like a mindmap on my iPad.
