Growth of PearlTrees in the Social Media Jungle

PearlTrees is a digital library designed with a unique interface and mapping style. It’s a place to classify, store and save your favorite media found online.

This is popular social media ground to tread: Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Pinterest – These would all be considered social bookmarking. We’ve watch them rise and we’ve watched some fall, some change, and some become super trendy. So what makes PearlTrees different? A visually unique interface. Taking cues from Pinterest and Facebook, PearlTrees offers a visual approach online media storage. The PearlTrees map-like style works well with tablets and the smartphones and integrates well with social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Looks a lot like ThinkMap Visual Thesaurus, but with websites.

The biggest problem with Pearltrees is that it is Pinterest with cumbersome organization. Where Pinterest relies on pictures and videos to identify content, Pearltrees uses screenshots. Rather than neat boards you have branchy trees that are not easily sorted through. I imagine bailing on this program quickly once a pearl tree hits a certain, hard to filter size where I’d no longer be able to sort through what it there.

I’m approaching this just as I would television’s new Fall lineup when I’m deciding which new shows look really appealing . It’s a big fat no to Matthew Perry’s Go On, and it’s a big fat no to PearlTrees.