SlideShare vs Scribd

LinkedIn, the professional social network #1, is doing fine. During two last quarters LinkedIn manages to double its incomes - already up to $188 million/quarter. And the company is already valued at $10 billion. That's why LinkedIn can afford to buy the new users in bulk - for example, by purchasing online service SlideShare for $119 million. SlideShare works like Youtube - only not for video - but for presentations. And its target audience - are mostly business users (like in LinkedIn). You can upload to SlideShare your PowerPoint presentation and publish it anywhere in the embeddable web-viewer (like yuotube video). Besides SlideShare - is itself an additional marketing channel with a large audience, so by publishing a presentation on it, you can get new customers and partners. Will LinkedIn somehow integrate SlideShare into its network - is not clear yet, but at least they have already embedded LinkedIn presentation on the SlideShare homepage.

It seems that the days of Flash as a platform for the Rich web interfaces are really coming to an end. Online presentation services, for which the Rich-interface is most important, are ditching Flash in favour of HTML5. Last year, the market leader, SlideRocket released the HTML5-viewer and today the most popular presentation sharing service SlideShare has done the same. Moreover, SlideShare not just added the HTML5-view option but completely removed the Flash-option. Developers say the new HTML5-viewer is 30% faster and displays presentation on tablets (like iPad) and smartphones. In addition, you can now select and copy text from a presentation with the help of the mouse.

The online office service ThinkFree has launched a new Flash-based document viewer called Uni Paper. It can be embedded to any web page and displays most common office formats: PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The max file size is 5MB. The readers can view and search in a document without the need to download it to desktop. And when you edit this published document in your online ThinkFree account, the changes are reflected in real-time back anywhere the Uni Paper has been embedded or shared. Besides the opportunity of publishing documents on your site, you can add it to ThinkFree public catalog, that can attract additional readers. But ThinkFree's viewer is not so advanced as one in Scribd, Docstoc, Slideshare. For example, it's missing the option to view all the pages of a document at once, and the the directory of publicly shared documents contains very little categorization, or genre-based exploration.

Here's a simple formula for a successful startup: find a popular service (e.g. YouTube), remember what you can do best of all (i.e. presentations), put "for" between these two words and probably you'll get an interesting idea. That's what the creators of SlideShare did. And they have already raized $3 million on their idea. So, what is YouTube killer feature? A first glance it's - huge video catalog. But that's only at first glance. In fact, Youtube became so popular, because it allows you to:

The online office service ThinkFree has launched a new Flash-based document viewer called Uni Paper. It can be embedded to any web page and displays most common office formats: PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The max file size is 5MB. The readers can view and search in a document without the need to download it to desktop. And when you edit this published document in your online ThinkFree account, the changes are reflected in real-time back anywhere the Uni Paper has been embedded or shared. Besides the opportunity of publishing documents on your site, you can add it to ThinkFree public catalog, that can attract additional readers. But ThinkFree's viewer is not so advanced as one in Scribd, Docstoc, Slideshare. For example, it's missing the option to view all the pages of a document at once, and the the directory of publicly shared documents contains very little categorization, or genre-based exploration.

Drop.io, the file storage and sharing service, has partnered with Scribd to let its users quickly view different types of documents in their account. From now on all supported documents in Drop.io you can see the option to view it online in Scribd’s Flash-based iPaper viewer. Drop.io isn't the first file storage that integrated with Scribd. For example Box.net, a similar service, offers iPaper integration and lets users edit their files using Zoho. It’s possible that Drop.io is aiming for simplicity over a more complete feature set, but allowing for platform-agnostic file editing probably wouldn’t hurt. Other players in this space include Omnidrive and Dropbox.

Scribd - is a service that positions itself as an "YouTube for documents". When you first come to Scribd, you may think that this is another toy for bloggers and communities, but maybe soon it will become a common tool for any business, like Word for example. How businesses are using YouTube? Basically, to present their new products. YouTube - is the most convenient way to publish a business-related video and the most convenient way to view it for your clients. Moreover, YouTube is useful not only as a website, but as a service for publishing the video anywhere. But besides these video-presentations customers sometimes want to view product documentation or company white papers. Usually companies just upload pdf-files on their sites. But believe, when your customer opens a document in Scribd's online viewer, it's a big difference from downloading the pdf file.