* Scribd is a sort of YouTube for documents
Document sharing has become crucial in just about everybody’s business life, but while you can share documents via services such as e-mail there are always the issues of whether the recipient can receive files beyond a certain size, whether the file can be provided when needed, whether everyone has the latest version, and so on.
The answer to these problems is to use a document sharing service and there’s a new(ish) kid on the document sharing block you should check out: Scribd. Scribd is a sort of YouTube for documents.
Also, I say “new(ish)” because although Scribd is not particularly well-known it was launched just over a year ago and currently hosts some 2 million documents attracting some 20 million visitors per month!
Scribd offers, for free, unlimited storage of files in all major formats including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel; Open Office; Images (jpg, png, gif, tiff); and Text (txt, rtf); and allows the upload of multiple files over HTTP. The service also supports “slurping” – the capture of files from URLs (this is actually part of Scribd’s API).
Once documents have been uploaded to Scribd you and authorized users can view them using Scribd’s iPaper viewer (no relation to Adobe’s Flashpaper except that it is also written in Adobe Flash).
You can publish documents stored on Scribd either privately for yourself, to a group, or publicly. Group and public documents can be rated by readers and embedded anywhere on the Web. You can also create custom RSS feeds to alert users to document changes as well as tag documents, and perform topical and full text searches and you can not only view documents, but also download them in various formats. In short, Scribd is a sort of super library.
To monetize the service Scribd currently inserts interstitial ads from Google into iPaper documents – these are fairly innocuous and not particularly intrusive, but they are context-related and earn Scribd something over $1 million per annum.
An interesting historical note is that Scribd tried to offer a Facebook application called “ShareHomework,” which, in theory, would have allowed college students to share homework. Curiously the application didn’t take off and the CEO told me that it seems that students were more interested in applications such as “Give a beer to a friend.” Who knew?
Scribd is very slick and its platform has huge enterprise and Web application potential allowing third parties to monetize document delivery for themselves.
As a vehicle for publishing things like manuals and product guides vendors should be jumping on this service. Definitely one to watch!
