With the development of its core communities, the main uses of Pearltrees are emerging.

I will regularly discuss the various innovations Pearltrees users bring to the community: I expect them to surprise us a lot, to find new ways of using the tools, to trigger the development of new key functionalities, and of course to disappoint us sometimes… In one word to make Pearltrees platform their very own place and Pearltrees vision their very own project.

For now on, three main usages are emerging, which structure day-to-day life in Pearltrees:

1- Using Pearltrees to organize one’s Web.

Users collect new content while navigating. They progressively build their maps, modify them, group and ungroup then to retrieve their contents of interest. Is it still bookmarking? Probably much more than this: by building content maps and putting then in other maps, users deal with much more contents than in traditional bookmarking services. In few weeks, some users put thousands of pages in their account while still making the maps understandable. With Pearltrees, a content is no more a carefully picked website : it is an element of a broader story.

2- Using Pearltrees to communicate.

Becoming a communication tool is one of Pearltrees’ core objectives, and many users have indeed began to use Pearltrees’ maps to communicate. Thanks to their maps, they guide their friends or readers through the Web, support their points, report and summarize discussions… They progressively demonstrate the power of maps to broadcast simple and complex stories, thus truly becoming a Web editor community.

3- Using Pearltrees to discover new horizons on the Web.

This is the less obvious and maybe the less widespread of the three main usage yet. As the collective map of Pearltrees, it may nonetheless become the most powerful. Certain parts of Pearltrees are already dense enough, so users can jump from their maps to other interesting maps that cross then, find interesting contents, and continue to jump from map to other maps, either discovering more on the same topic or finding related but completely different themes….

… They are navigating the interest graph which is the very nature of Pearltrees.

Filed under: Community by Frocaboy on April 20th, 2009