New developments are taking place at the Scribd office in recent times. The site which helps users share documents is now working on becoming a little more “social”. Scribd recently announced that users will now be able to subscribe to each others scribble boxes and reading lists. These scribble boxes in principle are like twitter feeds where users can write their opinions/comments about the document. Each user has a home page through which he can keep track of the scribbling and reading lists of the users he’s subscribed to. “The whole experience is built around publishing and reading,” says Trip Adler, the site’s chief executive.
According to the Scribd blog, here’s the entire list of new features added:
New features include:
- Find people who match your reading interests through our new community page
- Create and manage personal reading lists
- Share your thoughts through comments, an updated 5-star rating system, and new “Scribble” box (soon-to-be-synced with Twitter and Facebook).
- Subscribe to favorite authors or readers and receive notifications the moment they publish new works, rate a document, or Scribble
- Publish documents directly from your homepage using our new single-click uploader
Scribd hopes to change reading from a solitary experience to something which the community can participate in together by sharing views, ideas etc in real time and from all over the world. From being the youtube of the written word, it’s now also an ebook store.
Scribd has been working really hard to improve the user experience. Recent reports said that the traffic to Scribd had fallen by 48% since June. The reason was because Scribd was using less aggressive SEO tactics, meaning, they wanted people to be redirected to only those pages which they really wanted to see, thus making them more relevant.
From this WSJ article, we find out that about 2 million people have already started using the subscription facility that Scribd started to offer (informally) about 12 days ago. Besides this, Scribd receives close to 40 million unique visitors per month.
