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Pearltrees

Available in	English / French
Owner	Broceliand, S.A.S. [1]
Created by	Patrice Lamothe [2], Francois Rocaboy, Samuel Tissier, Nicolas Cynobar and Julien Wallen
Revenue	The company is currently pre-revenue and has yet to commence monetization efforts
URL	pearltrees.com
Registration	Required for full functionality
Launched	Public Alpha March, 2009 [3]Open Beta, December 2009 [4]
Current status	Open beta [5]

Pearltrees is a mind map-style social bookmarking website that allows users to collect, organize and share any URL they find online. The product features a unique visual interface ^{[7] [8]} that allows users to drag and organize collected URLs into units called pearls ^[9] that themselves can be further organized in a hierarchical structure with pearltrees ^[10]the company's nomenclature for customizable folders that contain pearls (URLs). Users of the product can also engage in social/ collaborative curation using a feature called Pearltrees Teams ^[11].

Pearltrees claims to be among the first companies to provide an exposed interest graph ^[12]. The company's mission is to help users "Cultivate Their Interests" ^[13]As part of the product's social features, Pearltrees users can synchronize their accounts with both Twitter and Facebook. This bi-directional functionality supports the collection of new pearls each time a link is shared or tweeted. New links added to user accounts and new pearltrees created by users can also be broadcast via a user's Twitter and Facebook accounts if users have enabled this feature. Users can also embed a pearltree into most CMS products including WordPress blogs, Drupal websites, Typepad blogs and others ^[14].

Pearltrees was founded by Patrice Lamothe, CEO of Paris, France ^[15], Alain Cohen, CTO ^[16], Nicolas Cynober, Technical Director ^[17], Samuel Tissier, Ergonomy/UI ^[18] and Francois Rocaboy, CMO ^[19]. A sixth co-founder, Julien Wallen ^[20] left the company in October, 2010^{[ citation needed]}.

History

Development of Pearltrees began in 2007. An alpha was launched in March of 2009 ^[21] and made its first significant public appearance (in open beta) At LeWeb in December of 2009 ^{[22] [23] [24]}. According to CEO and Founder Patrice Lamothe he laid out the rationalization for this company in his blog post, "The Web's Third Frontier" where he proposed that curation and not the semantic web was the next logical phase of the Internet. ^[25].

At the 2010 Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Pearltrees introduced the ability to "super-embed" a pearltree into another website. ^[26] Pearltrees that have been embedded in other sites are updated dynamically whenever the original pearltree has been changed within the Pearltrees website.

In December of 2010 Pearltrees made their initial foray into collaborative curation with the launch of a new "team" feature. ^[27] The team feature allows users of the product to request to team-up on pearltrees that have already been curated by other users of the product. Once added to a team these additional curators are then able to add, remove and reorganize the content of that and any sub-pearltrees as well as to add new members to the team. ^[28]

In October of 2011 Pearltrees introduced Pearltrees for iPad. The product was well received by a number of technology bloggers including Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb ^[29] and Martin Bryant of TheNextWeb ^[30] As of May 2012, Pearltrees for iPad has maintained an overall 4.5 star rating in Apple's iPad App Store ^[31] .

Usage

The company has developed its own lexicon ^[32] to describe the functional units of the product as well as certain user behaviors. URLs are known as pearls, collections of URL's can be further organized into treelike structures known as pearltrees and sub-pearltrees. The act of collecting URLs is called "pearling" content. Users can collect URLs in several ways: by entering URLs directly into a dialog box within the product itself, while browsing the web and using a browser extension or add-on, via the product's ability to capture links as they are tweeted and as a result of sharing links on Facebook. Users of Pearltrees' iOS product for iPad can capture URLs using a bookmarklet or by entering the URL directly into a dialog box within the app itself.

The product also allows users to curate collaboratively using the "team" feature. Teams can include two or more members. A number of the more popular teams in the product appear to have well in excess of 50 individuals curating a common topic ^{[33] [34]}

In addition to teaming up with other users of the product, Pearltrees allows a more passive means of following another user's pearltrees. The company's "pick" feature allows a user to copy a pearltree to their own account. When this action is taken the user who added this pearltree to their own account is essentially subscribed to that pearltree. As the tree is enlarged, reorganized or pruned, the user that has picked it will see these same changes reflected in the picked pearltree as they happen; in effect this is a "subscription" to another user's curation of a topic.

Communication amongst users of the product is supported in several ways. Comments can be left by anyone on any individual pearl or pearltree. Private messages can also be sent between any two people that have at least one pearl (URL) in common between their accounts. Teams each have their own unique private message board that is visible only to members of a given team. Users can also share pearls or pearltrees within the product or via share-points that feature prominently within Pearltrees user interface. Sharing to Facebook, Twitter, individual email addresses and directly from one user to another are supported. ^[35] Users can also extract an embed code and past it into blogs and other content management systems.

Pearltrees claims to have created one of the first exposed interest graphs on the web. ^[36] When a user of the product enters the "discovery mode" the 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.

There are a number of notification elements in Pearltrees. These include notifications a user receives when their content has been "picked" by another user. They will also be notified when they receive a team-up request or when another member of one of their teams adds additional members or content to a team pearltree. Notifications are also given within the product whenever new pearls have been added to a user's pearltrees. These notifications appear in two distinct "feeds" within the product; "notifications" and "news" respectively and can also be received via email depending upon how a user chooses to configure their external notification options.

The iPad version of Pearltrees is generally very similar to the web based version of the product although it has a number of limitions resulting from things such as the screen size of the iPad. Multi touch is well supported in the iPad version of Pearltrees. Pinching to zoom, holding a pearl to relocate it to another section of any account and navigation of the discovery screens take significant advantage of the iPad's tactile interface.

Privacy

Within the Pearltrees product, every link collected in every account is fully public, however the company is on record as saying that it plans to introduce granular privacy features in the future as on aspect of their monetization strategy. ^[37]

Demographics

According to Alexa, Pearltrees has a nearly 50/50 gender distribution. The audience of the site skews younger with the 18-24 year old and 25-34 year old segments being most significant. Users tend to have above average education with a higher than average (compared to overall Internet statistics) number of users with a post graduate education. ^[38]

Growth

Pearltrees has a slow but consistent rate of growth that appears to remain steady at around 15% per month. The company reached an initial milestone of 10,000 users in December of 2009 shortly after launching the product at LeWeb in Paris. Less then a year and a half later the Pearltrees community had increased 10 fold as reported in a number of Technology blogs including SiliconAngle.

Pearltrees claims to be one of the largest communities of curators on the web ^[39] By December of 2011 the company claimed to have over 300,000 registered users and as of March 2012 this number had increased to over 400,000.^{[ citation needed]}.

The company aslo claims to have broken the 1 million unique visitors per month barrier in January of 2012 and to have received in excess of 30,000,000 pageviews this same month. ^{[ citation needed]}.

Business

Pearltrees is a pre-revenue company that has to date secured $12.2 million in Angel and Venture funding in 4 separate rounds: The company received an initial one million Euro investment from friends, family and angel investors in June of 2008. This was followed by a second, larger angel round of €1.5M in June of '09. The company secured an additional €1.3M in angel funding in June of 2010 ^[40] and raised a substantial A-round of $6.6 million (USD) in January of 2012. ^[41] To date this brings the total raised to $12.2 million USD ^[42]

Investors

The company has generally revealed little about its sources of funding and has never sought or received investment from typical venture funds or any US investors. To date, there have only been two investors/investment groups named as having contributed capital to the startup:

Pierre Ksciusko Morizet Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet ^[43] and Group Accueil ^{[44] [45]}

Awards

In 2010 Pearltrees was one of six companies to participate in the Web2.0 Expo Launchpad competition. ^[46] The company was also called "A Leap Forward" ^[47] by OSEO ^[48]

Browser Extensions

• Pearltrees "Pearler" for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple's Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer - support collection of content directly from the browser. The pearler enables placement of a link directly into the account of the user. Function varies depending upon the browser, but generally allows: collection of links into product's "drop-zone", a temporary storage for links not yet placed into a specific location within a user's account, placement of links to a specified folder or sub-folder within an account, creation of new folders and sub-folders, navigation directly to the root of an account or navigation to a particular location within an account. The iOS version of the product requires the installation of a bookmarklet
  • Chrome
  • Firefox

Technology Stack

The following information describes Pearltrees' technology stack as of February 2011. ^[49]

User Interface

'''Flex''' Flex is an ActionScript (Flash) Framework that enables Pearltrees to develop the user interface of the web version. It makes it possible to quickly develop a rich interface and to deploy it on a large number of terminals.

'''HTML''' Is used to feed search engines and give an alternate version for terminals that don’t support Flash. All the content in Pearltrees is available in HTML format. HTML was also used when developing the Pearltrees embed. To resolve integration issues in an uncontrolled environment the company also uses some HTML5 properties.

' ''Javascript''' Pearltrees relies heavily on javascript for a number of cases: animations in Pearltrees’ browser, embeds and extensions. JQuery is used when manipulating the DOM.

'''RDF''' RDF is a semantic web related format used for exporting data from Pearltrees.

'''XUL''' XUL is the presentation format used by Mozilla. It is used in Pearltrees’ extension for Firefox.

'''C++''' The IE extension has been entirely developed in C++.

'''Objective-C''' Objective-C has been used to develop Pearltrees iPad application along with the cocos2d game framework to handle various animations and effects.

Server

'''Java''' Java 6 and Tomcat are used in order to make the Pealrtrees application and the company's ranking algorithm “Tree Rank” work. While the company has not divulged the specifics of their algorithm, Tree Rank appears to calculate the relationships between pearltrees and to support the discovery of related content. ^[50] Tree Rank runs on a HazelCast cluster and is hosted in the Cloud. The company also utilizes Lucene as a basis for its search engine and is currently experimenting with Cassandra.

'''PHP''' Pearltrees' backend uses PHP. First on Zend Framework and Apache, most server code is now on Java. According to Pearltrees Co-Founder and Technical Director, Nicolas Cynober, the company decided to use java instead of the Zend framework because they had performance issues with the latter. However some applications are still operating in Zend Framework because the company uses Piwik for generating stats.

'''MySQL''' MySQL 5.1 is used for Pearltrees' main database. The core base has 35 tables and more than 60 million rows. It is run on two master / slave machines (48Gigs of ram and 32 CPUs).

'''S3''' Pearltrees' file server was originally powered by NFS v3 to share logos, avatars and thumbshots, but the company subsequently moved and mirrored its 200Gig of of assets into several Amazon S3 locations. Although the company primarily uses Amazon CloudFront, some files are also published through the level3 CDN.

'''Xen''' Xen enables the virtualization of Pearltrees' “Fetch” software, which is running on 16 virtual machines. Fetch manages the creation of thumbnails and the preparation of the pre-loading of the web pages when browsing a pearltree. As of February 2011, the system was capable of processing 10.000 URLs / hr.

'''Bash, Python''' The administration of Pearltrees' servers is mostly done with scripts written in bash and python. The company also uses python in software that detects URLs that can’t be viewed within an iFrame.

See also

• List of social bookmarking websites

Delicious ^[51]

References

External links

• Official website

[[[it:Pearltrees]]