Scribd - Social PDF Sharing, Oh Joy!
Okay, I’ll admit that the idea of a socially-driven site built around sharing documents doesn’t sound terribly enticing, but I have fallen in love with Scribd. Scribd has a great design and a surprisingly simple and low-key method of embedding document files (support for .doc, .lit, .pdf, .ppt, .ps, .txt, .xls) within websites via their special flash player.
Scribd’s homepage actually looks nice.
TechCrunch calls it YouTube for documents and in that respect, Scribd kicks ass. I love reading the occasional tech book and Scribd just might be a great way to discover such books, read them online and send them to friends. Just like YouTube, however, we will definitely see some for-pay PDFs and documents show up on Scribd, but what else is new. I’d suggest browsing Scribd for interesting content.
One thing that is cool about Scribd but makes me wonder why they even bothered is the section of traffic analytics on the bottom of the document pages. It shows interesting stats about that particular document, including the location of each visitor and fancy graphs for page views and uniques. They did, however, misspell the word “referrers”.
The last view in Atlanta, GA was me.
I checked out Scribd the other day too. Pretty interesting.
But regarding your comment on the misspelling of referrer, read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referer
Interesting story behind that..
There is another new company in this space. It is called OpenFloodgate. Their slogan is, “Opening the path to publication to everyone.†This site now allows you to share your work (anything that can be uploaded as a doc or pdf) and will soon allow you to sell it. Also, you can make each work public, private, or only available to a select “club.†Check it out at openfloodgate.com
Thanks much for the nice comments about Scribd! I’m very glad you like it.
By the way, I investigated what you said about the misspelling of “referer”. Turns out that the story is rather interesting. Here is Wikipedia’s explanation of the situation:
“Referer is a common misspelling of the word referrer. It is so common, in fact, that it made it into the official specification of HTTP – the communication protocol of the World Wide Web – and has therefore become the standard industry spelling when discussing HTTP referers.”
Since the sort of referer we are dealing with is in fact, a HTTP referer, I think I may leave it how it is. But I’ll keep this in mind for future situations.
Best,
Jared