Question
How does Pearltrees compare to Trailmeme?
Answer
Francois is mistaken. We had been internally testing Trailmeme for months before we first heard of Pearltrees. The project launched in Xerox in December 2007, and actually started life as a WordPress plugin (which you can get at: http://trailmeme.com/tools/WordP... ). We began internal user testing in March/April of 2009. We were in stealthy private beta for about a year, between August 2009 - August 2010, before launching into public beta in September 2010.
Despite superficial similarities the products are very different. Both are, to an extent, inspired by ideas such as mind-mapping. Our own most direct inspiration is of course Vannevar Bush's 1945 ideas on "trails" and "trailblazing."
Among the foundational differences is that Trailmeme allows you full control over the visual layout so you can create any sort of geometry you like. This of course is a "with great power, comes great responsibility" choice on our part.
Pearltrees automates the layout so that the presentation is largely under the control of the service, not the user. In pearltrees for example, you cannot do something like recreate the entire periodic table:
http://trailmeme.com/trails/The_...
Or create a visual representation of the BP Oil Spill news that actually looks like an oil rig (this is a whimsical example of course):
http://trailmeme.com/trails/The_...
I am not saying Pearltrees should try to do these things. It is a different product that was designed with different needs in mind.
This level of visual control means it takes more creative thought to create a trail than a pearltree, since you have to think about the visual design and narrative, and the intent behind creating the trail. The social model is more of an author-audience one to some extent (which follows from our roots in a WordPress plugin), or like a collaborative art project.
So the core visual product is basically designed with power users and creative visual thinkers in mind. All the other non-core features and feature differences follow from this one basic difference. Since the "Visual Web" is in its early days, it is understandable that people new to the space aren't sensitive to apparently small distinctions that create major differences.
So I won't bother commenting on specific feature sets and comparables since both are evolving products. We are certainly not ignoring the social aspect. We are just taking a very different approach, optimized for different use cases. You will of course see a lot of apparently "common" feature sets. All airplanes have wings, engines and fuselages. That doesn't make a B-52 the same as a commercial airliner or a fighter plane. The 3 types of planes are simply designed with different missions in mind. All word processing programs can open, edit, save and print files. That doesn't make MS-Word the same as Adobe InDesign. One creates everyday office documents, the other creates professionally-designed ones. Both are useful. What differentiates products in a category is of course the design intent and design principles.
Which means, incidentally, that you should think carefully about what you want to do before picking one. Some purposes, Trailmeme serves better. Other purposes, Pearltrees serves better.
Update: Trailmeme is now fully collaborative and version-controlled. The collaboration model is designed differently from Pearltrees though.
Despite superficial similarities the products are very different. Both are, to an extent, inspired by ideas such as mind-mapping. Our own most direct inspiration is of course Vannevar Bush's 1945 ideas on "trails" and "trailblazing."
Among the foundational differences is that Trailmeme allows you full control over the visual layout so you can create any sort of geometry you like. This of course is a "with great power, comes great responsibility" choice on our part.
Pearltrees automates the layout so that the presentation is largely under the control of the service, not the user. In pearltrees for example, you cannot do something like recreate the entire periodic table:
http://trailmeme.com/trails/The_...
Or create a visual representation of the BP Oil Spill news that actually looks like an oil rig (this is a whimsical example of course):
http://trailmeme.com/trails/The_...
I am not saying Pearltrees should try to do these things. It is a different product that was designed with different needs in mind.
This level of visual control means it takes more creative thought to create a trail than a pearltree, since you have to think about the visual design and narrative, and the intent behind creating the trail. The social model is more of an author-audience one to some extent (which follows from our roots in a WordPress plugin), or like a collaborative art project.
So the core visual product is basically designed with power users and creative visual thinkers in mind. All the other non-core features and feature differences follow from this one basic difference. Since the "Visual Web" is in its early days, it is understandable that people new to the space aren't sensitive to apparently small distinctions that create major differences.
So I won't bother commenting on specific feature sets and comparables since both are evolving products. We are certainly not ignoring the social aspect. We are just taking a very different approach, optimized for different use cases. You will of course see a lot of apparently "common" feature sets. All airplanes have wings, engines and fuselages. That doesn't make a B-52 the same as a commercial airliner or a fighter plane. The 3 types of planes are simply designed with different missions in mind. All word processing programs can open, edit, save and print files. That doesn't make MS-Word the same as Adobe InDesign. One creates everyday office documents, the other creates professionally-designed ones. Both are useful. What differentiates products in a category is of course the design intent and design principles.
Which means, incidentally, that you should think carefully about what you want to do before picking one. Some purposes, Trailmeme serves better. Other purposes, Pearltrees serves better.
Update: Trailmeme is now fully collaborative and version-controlled. The collaboration model is designed differently from Pearltrees though.