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Scoop.it Wants to Make Curation Frictionless

Frederic Lardinois

Apr 29, 2011 — 2 min read

One of the most over-hyped concepts of the last year is “curation.” Most curation services, with the exception of sites like Tumblr, aren’t really ready for the mainstream. Scoop.it, on the other hand, wants to make curation as frictionless as possible and allow anybody to easily create magazine-like pages with curated content in just a few clicks. I’ve tested many curation services over the last few months. Scoop.it has been the only one that I’ve really stuck with.

At its core, Scoop.it is really bookmarking on steroids. It’s clearly geared towards relatively mainstream users, but also fulfills most of the requirements more advanced users would have. As the company’s CEO and founder Guillaume Decugis told me earlier this year when we met up at SXSW, he sees two major markets for the product: companies that don’t have the resources to blog but still want to put up relevant content for their customers and users who are passionate about a certain topic, be it freestyle skiing or tech news.

You currently have to sign up for a private beta invite, but starting next week, sign-ups will be semi-open.

How it Works

So how does it all work? To get started, you simply decide on a name for your curation site (you can manage more than one) and install the bookmarklet. Then, whenever you see a story or site you want to feature, simply click on the bookmarklet and Scoop.it will automatically pre-populate its form with the title, an image from the story and the first few sentences of the text (you can modify these, too). Once you’re done with this, you send the snippet over to your page on Scoop.it and either call it a day or decide where to place it on the grid and modify the size and position of the image.

Scoop.it also offers a second method for curating content, as the service itself will suggest stories to you based on the keywords you have entered for your page.

Coming Soon: Reconciling Blogging, Facebook Pages and Curation

The service has a number of new features planned for the very near future. The next version of Scoop.it will include the ability to send items directly to Facebook pages and WordPress and Tumblr blogs, an API and a widget that will allow publishers to promote their curation sites on their own properties. As Decugis told me, nobody really wants to have to maintain yet another site, so bringing all of these features together should make things a lot easier for Scoop.it users.

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