Pearltrees allows you to bookmark sites just like StumbleUpon. It mixes that function with the pinning and organizing approach of Pinterest. You can post notes and photos as well as the URLs, which are referred to as ‘pearls’. The folders you put them in and organize heirachically are called ‘pearltrees. You can then engage in an open curation of the trees with others on a Pearltrees Team.
This best explains how it all works:
When a user of the product enters the “discovery mode” they are presented with a cluster of pearltrees that the company claims are closely related to the central pearltree by virtue of commonalities between their respective accounts. As the UI is dragged with the mouse (or in the case of the iPad app, with a finger) more pearltrees will appear. The further out one navigates from the original central pearltree the further away from the original topic the pearltrees that begin to appear become. As an example, should a central pearl in discovery mode be “autism”, adjacent pearls would likely be “ADHD”, “Asperger’s”, “dyslexia”, etc., while pearltrees potentially found somewhat further from the center might include those on cancer, behavior, psychology and more. – Wikipedia
The site and app are set up so that you can share your activity through Facebook or Twitter. The app features an “offline-mode” that supports the browsing of all collected content regardless of whether the phone is connected to a network or not. There is a browser plug-in like Pinterest as well to facilitate the bookmarking of websites. One can also embed pearls into most CMS including WordPress and Drupal.
Embedded Pearl:
Pearltrees has a nearly 50/50 gender distribution and leans to a younger set with the Millenials being most significant. Users tend to also have post secondary and graduate education.
Pearltrees differs from other social bookmarking sites in that it has a pay to play model besides the regular free site. At $39.99 a year, premium members are given the following options. I am not sure if this model (which works well for sites such as LinkedIn for a variety of other unrelated reasons) is going to fly. Time will tell. Here are some of the extras you get for ponying over your cash, some of which ones questions why they are not available anyway such as account protection:
- Create private pearltrees
- Manage the confidentiality of your teams
- Select your level of sharing
- Add custom backgrounds to your pearltrees
- Personalize icons for every pearl
- Protect your account with a passcode (iOS)
- Enjoy priority support
- No promotions. No ads. Ever!
I tried it. For me I found it just did not give me that bang that I wanted. Pinterest was something I understood right away. StumbleUpon, once I started bookmarking, was also something I saw as value. With another site that claims to be social but really is just a bookmark and photo organizer that I have have others organize with me, its not high on my list of return engagements.
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