Webupon

Pearltrees is a fascinating and innovative new social networking site that is centered on communicating common interests in a visually interesting and complex manner. Pearltrees uses the concept of organizing individual topics and overall subject matter within user defined points of data, the ‘pearls’ from the title, which connect webs of content, serving as the ‘tree’ portion of the title. Once these trees are created, all springing from the central point of a user profile, ala Facebook, it creates a repository of what a person is interested in their life and online experience.

The way this system becomes a social networking experience is that by searching within Pearltrees you can access other user’s pearltrees, grab the trees that you find interesting and attach them to your own pearltree. In doing this you access the wealth of information that this individual, who shares these specific interests with you, and store it should you ever wish to access it later. It is, in certain ways, a tool for sharing an entire archive of bookmarks, or, even more exciting, a method of explaining the thought behind the organization of information.

In addition, the inventive visual organization allows this information to quickly be shifted into new areas, or simply connected to other pertinent topics. The ongoing process of integrating Twitter with Pearltrees makes the process of logging bookmarks even easier, and lines up with Twitter’s main functionality – whereas Twitter serves as an important source for sharing links, Pearltrees becomes the perfect repository for storing them. 

Of course, Pearltrees is not perfect. It only entered beta on December 9th, 2009, and certain features still feel clunky and unresponsive. Also, the website’s developers are from France, which means that many of the most well-established and active pearltrees are in French. Furthermore, the visual nature, groundbreaking as it might be, is a bit less intuitive than sites such as Facebook or Myspace. However, it still represents an amazing advance in social networking, one that must, and should, be seen to believed.