Pearltrees Delivers Real-Time Human Curation of the Web: Feature Updates

Pearltrees, the first human-organized network of interests on the web, unveiled a number of new features today, to manage your own web - instantaneously, in just two clicks.

Users organize their interests and passions on the web using intuitive drag and drop functionality, while discovering new information from people who share common interests.

Client Pearltrees now offers users an experience closer to how humans manage items in real life. For example, the “pearls” in Pearltrees represent the Web content a user finds interesting.

Below is a search that I did on consciousness. The window pop-up on the left shows my results and I can dive deeper into a user's pearls depending on the number of hits they received or more importantly, where my interest interjects with theirs. By clicking on a pearltree, a whole new world opens up for me to devour. I can add some of this user's content to my own, or create new content from what I learn by exploring his pearls and so on.

Much more than just bookmarks, pearls are Web objects that can be manipulated. I find this feature addictive. I can organize pearls by dragging and dropping in just a few clicks and suddenly I have created a "new story." Users also can organize and reorganize accounts instantly without the need to tag and re-tag to keep and retrieve new content.

When users pearl online content, it appears instantly on their pearltree and is visible to all other Pearltrees users. A key component to Pearltrees is that users organize their own web of interests in real time, similar to how we organize information outside of the digital world.

Unlike a traditional social network, users can connect through specific interests, not friends. When users share the same pearl, there is a connection that ensures users have a common interest. By adding another user’s Pearltree or branch to their own Pearltree, a user can follow the topic as curated specifically by that user. AND, continue to follow along or not, depending on the degree of interest.

A few new updates:

**Pearltrees has updated its Firefox and Internet Explorer toolbar plugins to more easily organize the Web directly from the toolbar. Now users can see a hierarchical text image of their pearltree and immediately add a new pearl in its correct place.

**On Pearltrees, everyone’s interests are constantly changing within their own online worlds. To monitor activity and continually discover new content, Pearltrees has established a reporting system that simplifies access to news. This access is now a single click, regardless of the location of new pearls.

**Pearltrees has updated the user interface of the site to make management more visual and ergonomic, creating a smoother and richer experience.

**Updated TwitterSync, allowing for further synchronization and intuitive capabilities with Twitter. TwitterSync automatically pearls URLs tweeted to a user’s pearltree. Now with TwitterSync, users can directly add a tweeted URL to a specific Pearltree branch by adding a hashtag that denotes the correct branch, i.e., #exactnameofthepearltree. The feature also now catches common mistakes such as spaces and spelling and will retrieve the correct pearltree.