Scoop.it is Tumblr without the blogging [Invites]

TNW Quick Look

Scoop.it is a new Web curation platform, giving users a personal place to share themed content.

Hits:

• Easy, good-looking Web curation
• ‘Suggested’ column makes finding new content easy.

Misses:

• Is it different enough from “reblogging” and other curation services to make a mark?

The details

As well as being a super-simple blogging platform, Tumblr is a hugely popular place for people to “reblog” content from around the web. New service Scoop.it is hoping to attract a userbase by stripping out the blogging part and concentrating on curation – and we’ve got invites for 100 The Next Web readers to try it.

Scoop.it allows users to set up themed ‘Topics’. So, you could run a ‘Golf’ page, a ‘European startups’ page or a ‘movies’ page. Then you go about adding related content that you want to share on the topic’s page. Content can be added via an easy-to-use bookmarklet, or manually with a ‘Post’ button on the topic’s page.

If you’re stuck for inspiration, a feed of ‘Suggested items’ can help you by seeking out content from around the social Web. The sources and search terms used can be tweaked if they’re not working for you.

Users can follow others’ topic pages and are able to suggest content to curators of those topics directly from the bookmarklet. If the topic curator late rejects the suggestion, he or she can write a note back to the suggester explaining why it didn’t make the cut.

Curation is a busy area right now. Startups like Curated.by, Storify and Pearltrees all offer their own takes on the idea of sharing personalised collections of content. Scoop.it’s Paris-based founders see the service as a way of ‘creating your own magazine’, similar to the way Paper.li builds “social newspapers”, but with more manual input. However, to me it fits more into the Tumblr and Posterous reblogging area, with the ‘curation’ twist of all the content being viewable on one page.

Will it take off? It’s certainly easy enough to pick up and create a Topic page that you’ll be happy to share with others.Whether it can differentiate itself from both the reblogging and curation tools to find a space somewhere in the middle remains to be seen.

Scoop.it has set up 100 invites for The Next Web readers. Just click here to create an account, but be quick before they all go.