Ideally this goes down as such: You really care about fashion so you search for fashion in the Pearltrees search box and are confronted with really elaborate visual cluster displays of fashion blogs, each blog its own “pearl.” You decide that anyone who likes The Sartorialist is probably a good egg and click on the puzzle piece in the Pearltrees detail window in order to ask if you can join the team.
If the team leader accepts, you then can see all the Pearltree curation happening as it happens as well as as comment on individual Pearltree decisions. You can also share your team curation easily via Facebook and Twitter.
In the same space as Storify and Pinterest, Pearltrees currently has 102,000 unique visits, 60,000 active users and 6 million pageviews monthly. Over 4 million pearls have been created thus far on topics as diverse as Windsurfing to Wikileaks.
And while the Pearltrees flash interface is somewhat tough to navigate, CEO Patrice Lamothe says that improving user interaction is a top priority, “One of the things we need to do better is be faster.” I’ve used PearlTrees to display information here, here, here and in the Crunchbase example above and my best advice is to get in there and play around, for often surprising results.
Paris-based Pearltrees currently has €3.8 million in funding and plans on launching PearlTrees Touch, a full touch interface that enables you to curate pearltrees in real time using your fingers, this week at Le Web.
Check out more on how to use Pearltrees to organize the web in the video below.
7 7Authors: Alexia Tsotsis