Like me, many readers will look back at Delicious with Web 2.0-tinted glasses. The social bookmarking site, long before it was acquired and then offloaded by Yahoo!, helped define what the cloud could deliver: By enabling a user to save their browser bookmarks online — a potentially selfish act — the wider community also got to benefit.
Fast forward nearly ten years and you’d think that social bookmarking as a startup opportunity has had its day. But in actual fact, linking to, and therefore sharing content, is built into the Web’s plumbing, while the success of Pinterest, which adds a visual twist to the social bookmarking idea, has likely inspired other startups to try their hand.
One of those — at least on the surface — is Minilogs. The Paris-based startup is launching publicly today, as well as announcing a modest €200,000 seed round.
Carrying the strap-line “the best way to save, organize and share the things you love”, the site lets you ‘bookmark’ videos, audio, maps and slides, and arrange content into ‘minilogs’ which function like a playlist. These can be for personal utility or — you guessed it — shared publicly.
As you’d expect in 2013, Minilogs supports additional social features, such as the ability to vote up a minilog and to follow other users, Twitter-style. But, perhaps most useful, the site has implemented its own player, which lines up all content in a playlist as a single piece of content. The Minilogs player can even be embedded elsewhere — which I’m told is seeing it used by the French newspaper Le Figaro.
“We found that despite the explosion of rich content on the web over the last decade, the tools for saving, organizing and re-mixing these contents are woefully nonexistent,” said Minilogs co-founder Jean-Philippe Coutard in an email. “Pinterest (and its many clones) with their very visual product offering still only caters to one such media type – photos. What about videos, sounds, maps, slides? With Minilogs, we aim to bridge this gap by truly allowing you to bookmark and fully experience all content type on the web.”
However, “woefully nonexistent” is overstating it somewhat. There a ton of sites that enable you to bookmark and share video and audio content online, for example. Though Minilogs is also talking up its cross-provider compatibility. And it’s certainly true that users shouldn’t have to care what format content exists in — saving and sharing it should be just as easy as bookmarking a hyperlink.
Oh Delicious…