New service Embedit.in is launching on Tuesday with a tool that lets users host documents up to 20MB in size. Like Scribd, DocStoc, and others, Embedit.in uses Adobe Flash to power a viewer that lets users flip and scroll through pages in long documents.
As the name suggests, documents can be embedded either as a thumbnail that opens up to an overlay of the document reader, or as an embedded player like what you see lower down on this story. In either case, the service doesn't take visitors off whatever site they're on to let them see the content, which is nice.
Along with items users have uploaded individually, Embedit.in can be installed in the source code on any site. This turns any outgoing URLs that link to compatible document files into hosted Embedit.in docs. Each time it discovers a newly-added item it simply downloads it in the background, then reassigns the link.
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20090616/EmbedIt-in-inaction.png
(Credit: CNET)One area where Embedit.in differs from competing services is in letting users make small cosmetic changes to documents after they've been uploaded. To do this, it uses markup tools from parent company Increo's sister project, Backboard. This allows for simple things like highlighting, underlining, and circling. Missing, however, are some of the more advanced items like being able to add new chunks of text or images, or let users go in and make edits to the existing copy.
Embedit.in also has its own analytics dashboard for each document. This shows you how many views a document has, where viewers are from, how many times they've printed or downloaded a local copy, as well as a heat map of where user attention has been. It does this by tracking what parts of the document people have spent the most time on, and can be quite fun to look at if you've hosted something with images.
Embedit.in is very slick but misses some things I think are quite important. For one... Read more
TextFlow, the Adobe AIR application that lets users collaboratively edit documents, is now available in the browser. Users can group together multiple versions of the same document and selectively pick which edits they want to keep--just like they would on the desktop version, but now without software.
Along with the move to the browser, the service now hosts your documents so you can access and begin editing them from any computer. The company has also lifted the file size limit, meaning you can finally upload and edit documents more than 10 pages in length--not being able to do so was a serious limitation in versions past.
Additionally, the service comes in two flavors, a free and premium version. Both let you work on any size document, and with up to seven collaborators' edits; however the free one puts a watermark on the finished product that says "not for commercial use." The paid version--which costs $99 per user, per year--adds live customer support and the option to watermark shared documents with your company's logo.
Still missing in this version is support for images, tables, and documents outside of Microsoft Word and RTF files. I was hoping to see at least the images and tables support added to the professional version--not having those could severely limit the customers this service appeals to if it doesn't work with the document style they're used to.
Docuter is a free online document host that launched in early January. Like Scribd, Docstoc (which is currently down), and others, it lets you upload documents from your hard drive or a URL. These can be viewed on the site or embedded in Web pages like what I've done below.
Docuter's claim to fame is that it supports "over 200" different types of documents (here's a list). This includes image files, and soon it will include audio and video files. Like Scribd, it lets you upload files of any size, which is nice for uncompressed, image-heavy PDFs, compared to Docstoc's 50MB limit.
The technology is built on top of the Ajax Document Viewer, a service companies can install on their own servers for hosting documents internally or with clients. Coming soon will be support for adding annotations and redactions on top of the document. These will be stored on Docuter's servers and will be separate from the source document. Users will also soon be able to lock down a document to keep users from saving and printing.
If you're looking for a social document-sharing experience, Docuter may not be for you. It does not have a catalog of publicly published documents, or a way to search through anything Docuter members have made public. It's wickedly fast though, both for uploading and processing. The two PDFs I uploaded were ready to view (and share) immediately, which is handy in a pinch.
Last week Web-hosted documents service Issuu launched a brand-new service for business users who want to host document files without Issuu's branding or advertising. Users who subscribe to this model can be billed by the page view, all the way up to a million views a month, with a special viewer that can be both integrated and branded to match the site.
Additionally, pro subscribers get document SEO, reader analytics, and a bulk uploader to send up files in large batches. Of the three, SEO is likely to be the most attractive since documents that have been posted can bring readers back to other pages or get indexed into a site's search tool.
Still missing is a way to embed rich media elements in the docs, which despite running in Adobe Flash, cannot run Flash movie or music players. However, according to the pro service FAQ, this feature is coming.
Issuu is offering anyone the option to use the pro service free of charge until January 1, 2009. After that, you'll have to pick one of the six plans which range in price per page view from $19 to $1,140 a month.
Previously: Issuu is like Scribd's hotter cousin
Online document-hosting service Docstoc on Thursday is introducing a useful new tool for PCs and Macs that will automatically back up and sync documents from your hard drive to your Docstoc account.
Considering the growing trend of Netbooks with relatively little built-in storage, users with this desktop application installed with be able to offload whatever they created without having worry about running out of room.
By default, the syncing application goes for your documents folder, though you can set it to sync up with other folders on your hard drive or folders within your home network. Documents that are automatically updated get set as private, so others will not be able to see them, but you can set specific folders as public too.
To help manage all these files, the document home screen has also been given an overhaul that the company is calling MyDocs. It offers a little bit more than the documents folder on your computer, with simple thumbnail views, as well as a quick preview mode that lets you open up documents of any size and nearly any file type in about a second.
If you're a Mac user running Leopard, you've been able to do this with the proper quick-look plug-ins, but this is all on the Web.
Docstoc creator and CEO Jason Lawrence Nazar tells me that future versions of the syncing tool will include bidirectional syncing, meaning that changes made to documents in the cloud can be pushed back to your local machine. This should be coming in "weeks."
In the meantime, a company called Dropbox (review) has been offering something similar. It also requires special desktop software to get the job done.
Related: New Microsoft Office competition from Zoho, Zooos
Docstoc now offers a bird's-eye view of your Web documents, complete with live previews and editing. Using the new utility, you can also have it sync up all the documents from your hard drive.
(Credit: Docstoc)
File host Docstoc is releasing a solution on Wednesday for sending large attachments to friends, family, and co-workers. Called OneClick (download), the small application must be installed on your machine to enable right-click contextual menus that let you simply click any file on your hard drive and send it either publicly or securely to others.
Once the file's been transferred, you'll get a link to the Docstoc-hosted document inserted into a new e-mail message that your recipient can open and read without needing to install anything.
Like Scribd's solution, which launched last week, OneClick has been designed to entice business and casual users to start simply uploading their documents instead of e-mailing them for the sake of compatibility and size.
Not everyone has Gmail or Office 2007, which offer popular file compatibility. Nor have all users implemented the small software tweak on older versions of Office that will let you read those .Docx files with ease. Instead, solutions like Scribd and Docstoc are taking office software out of the equation entirely.
It's also a pretty simple way to get users uploading more of their documents from a local machine. Instead of having to go through Docstoc's Web uploader (which is simple and easy to use), you can get them uploaded with just two clicks whenever you come across something you'd like to upload.
The small application is PC-only for now, but I'm told a Mac version will be on its way soon. To see a video of the tool in action, click the link below.
Right-click on documents to upload them to Docstoc directly, then pop them conveniently into e-mails.
(Credit: Docstoc )... Read more
Calameo is a new service for publishing documents from your computer to the Web. Like Scribd, it's dead simple to use, and will slurp up all sorts of documents of up to 100MB in size. What makes the service noteworthy is that you can take documents online and offline with a click of a button, without removing them entirely--which could be useful to business or education users who want to upload many items, then make them public at a later date.
Of course, the strong suit with any of these document-hosting services is the viewer. Calameo's iteration is not nearly as fast as Scribd's iPaper at the highest quality settings, but it does a fantastic job rendering intricate details on PDFs. Power users can dial down the quality on a sliding scale of 1-100, with the lower numbers loading faster, and being suited for simple text documents. Users navigate the pages with simple page turns, which pop up in the corner of each page. There are also simple arrows on each side of the screen, as well as a table of contents to jump around--fairly standard stuff for a Flash-based document reader, but it works nicely.
What I like about Calameo though, is that it follows your mouse around, and has a beautiful full screen presentation mode that makes documents a highly interactive experience without detracting from the content. Users can add video or audio clips to these documents as long as they have a direct URL to a FLV or MP3 file that's hosted elsewhere. This is partially where the service breaks down a bit in its ease of use. You'll have to venture off elsewhere to find that content and get it hosted. It's really not hard if you use services such as Box.net or DivShare to host your files, but I think Calameo is missing out on a great opportunity to roll the storage for those files in the same place when it's already hosting your files in the first place.
I've embedded a sample Calameo document below. Be sure to check it out in the full screen viewer to get the whole experience.
See also: Scribd, Issuu (review), Yudu Freedom (review)
Thanks Fastjack!
One of my favorite document sharing services is Scribd. However, there's another document sharing service that has been around since early 2006, and boy if it doesn't have some good things going for it. It's called Issuu (pronounced "issue") and it's all about documents. In this case, it's only the ones in PDF format. Users can put together compilations of content and share them as they would photos or videos on other hosting services.
Issuu's big appeal is its media viewer, which presents the content like a real magazine. We've seen this in countless other sites and services, including Conde Nast's Flip.com, Adobe's Digital Editions software, Idio, and the HyperComics viewer, but Issuu manages to do it in a way that doesn't detract from the experience. Issuu in many ways makes reading online publications more enjoyable.
Each digital book is set on a simple gray background. There are little thumbnails, which are given a little zoom treatment when you mouse over them (akin to the OS X dock). The best part is that you can go into full screen mode, or simply zoom around with your mouse cursor to view each page in greater detail. It's completely intuitive, and great for documents with a lot of art (of which there are many).
Scribd still has the upper hand for written text documents, as its search is a fair bit more robust. However, it doesn't present highly visual content with as much flair. With Issuu you're stuck to PDF documents, which is a far cry from Scribd's compatibility with over a dozen popular file formats. It's still worth checking out Issuu, if only for its viewer, which is truly best of breed and a joy to use.
I've embedded a sample Issuu below. Click on it to get the full reading experience.
Docstoc is a document browsing and searching tool for "professional documents." Unlike Scribd, which has been casually called a "YouTube for documents," Docstoc is going for a more business-oriented crowd. At least that's their pitch. The features are very similar, with a communal sense of document sharing and live-viewer for MS Office documents, PDF files, and other popular file types.
One thing that does set it apart is its user profiles and document request system. Each user gets their own profile, complete with as much personal information as their willing to share, along with a link to their LinkedIn profile (if they have one). Underneath that is a full listing of their documents, which can be searched along with everyone else's shared content.
The document request system is a little more interesting. It lets you request a document you're looking for by setting tags or keywords. This basically sets up an alert that will keep an eye on other Docstoc user submissions. When someone uploads a document that matches your criteria, you'll receive an alert. Whether or not it really matches what you were looking for is anyone's guess, but the idea is that there's hope instead of dead ends when it comes to tracking down files.
The service demoed at today's TechCrunch40 conference, although is still in private beta. To get access, you can sign up on their front page. There's also a 6-month old pre-beta walkthrough on YouTube, which I've embedded after the break.
Share and track documenents with Docstoc, a new document sharing service.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Scribd, the document sharing and hosting service, has rebranded and tweaked its Facebook application this morning. Its new name is Share Homework, and the goal, according to Scribd, is to use it as a go-between for students and teachers to share documents with each other, and to help students do something about the documents that have been sitting unused for years on their hard drives.
Share your documents with other Facebook users with Scribd's Facebook application.
(Credit: CNET Networks)There's no real changes, besides a tweaked user interface and a new name (from the previous moniker of "Facebook Apps"). The tool is still a super-simple way to share documents and little more social than what Google Docs and Spreadsheets can offer, short of making the files public and sharing the link on your profile page. If you've seen or used Zoho's Facebook application (review), the idea is similar--everyone can see and read the documents you've shared without leaving Facebook, although unlike Zoho, you can't go in and make edits.
Scribd throws in a handful of nice features, like download links for multiple formats and a button to hear a document spoken aloud (although I couldn't get this to work within Facebook). There are helpful features, like tagging and categories, and everyone else can sort your documents in the community document pool. Users can comment on your documents as well. Best of all, uploading a document through the Facebook application will put it in the same public document pool found on Scribd.com.
I'd like to see Scribd add a way to link up several documents, to show thematic connections. For example, if you had a group of twenty documents about Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. It would be handy to be able to sort documents by theme, course, and school. The current presumption is that the user will enable this by tagging documents properly. A far easier solution would be to pull the person's school information and some other key details from the document's metadata, and then convert it into tags for grouping. This would make for some fascinating visualizations and browsing tools, and less work for users.
