* A social cataloging tool that helps you catalog practically anything
In every sphere of human endeavor there’s a “long tail” – an inventory of stuff that isn’t commercially interesting in terms of selling, storing, or indexing.
Given that there’s a lot more of this stuff than the stuff that has market value, or stuff that individuals care enough to want to catalog what they find or own, there’s an opportunity to enable these people in their quest for order in the long tail. This is the goal of Squirl, which the founders describe as “a social cataloging tool that helps you catalog practically anything. It lets you organize your stuff into collections and meet others with similar interests.”
Stripping the service down to its nuts and bolts, Squirl is an image uploading, storage, labeling, and tagging service (maximum image size is 1.5MB that will be automatically resized to 480 pixels) with commenting, RSS feed support, and import and export of tag and label data. Users can aggregate images into collections that can be set as private or public.
So what do people catalog? Anything you can think of. For example, among public collections at the time of writing there are 2000-2001 Topps Heritage Signed Basketball Cards; Books Read in 2006; Teapots; Lithographed Tin Plate Toy Airplanes; and Nursing and Hospital Badges.
Some Squirl users provide just a photo and minimal information while other users provide fascinating detailed explanations of their entries. One Squirl user, “Douglass,” is a serious antique scrimshaw collector and his detailed notes on Fijian Tabua are terrific.
Squirl provides social elements – you can invite other Squirl users to become “friends” and join groups. It also provides tools to apply the service in other contexts such as HTML “widgets” for WordPress, JavaScript widgets for other blogs and Web sites, and buttons for linking from other sites to your Squirl collections.
Squirl seems to be catching on. According to Squirl co-founder Steve De Brun, “We currently have about 2,600 people who have posted collections … We make money through subscriptions, contextural ads, and we also make money from affiliate programs such as Amazon.”
Squirl is free for up to 200 items in up to three collections and is funded through contextural ads. For $10 per year the ads disappear and you can have up to 5,000 items in an unlimited number of collections, $20 per annum ups the ante to unlimited items.
I see Squirl as typical of the new wave of Web infobusinesses where long tail user-driven niche markets can be addressed through a clever, sophisticated platform that has low start-up costs and demonstrable potential.
Built using Ruby on Rails on a highly accelerated schedule, Squirl has been self-funded so far. While the company isn’t specifically looking for investors they are trying to figure out where they are going to go with the project. De Brun characterizes the founders as guys who like to build things and now that they are cash flow positive and have proved their idea by building a loyal user base it is time to move on to the next stage. It will be worth watching to see what that next stage is.
