Plum - Crazy With Features

Plum is a social networking site that lets users collect and share all manner of digital media. This tastefully done aggregation site jumps into this competitive niche with a great tool called "the Plummer", a toolbar that allows users to add everything from Web pages to local documents and media. Plum is free and currently in private beta, but the essence of Plum is a service that allows a user to collect their favorite aspects of other online services into one place.

The service will allow the user the ability to combine everything they like into one central location in a way uncommon to other social networking sites. A Plum user can collect videos from YouTube, pictures from Flickr or Photobucket, emails from Yahoo! or Gmail, feeds from blogs or news sites and even office docs and PDFs. This data can then be organized, viewed, shared and published to the user's custom specifications.

The most unique aspect of Plum is its ability to automatically save some types of information like iTunes playlists or a recent browser history. This aspect combined with Plum's relevant interest suggestion aspect makes the service unique.

"Connections" further delineates Plum from other sites by analyzing aspects of a user's collections and comparing them to public collections based on; the items in the collection, the tags associated with the items, user comments, and the people who subscribed to that collection. Interactivity between users is promoted in the sharing, commenting and editing of particular collections, but individual users have control over the degree of interaction possible.

Plum is one of the most awaited startups on the Web, but somehow the beta has gone relatively silent of late. If Plum has any visible flaw it may be the number of features it offers users. Some sites simply try to offer too much, but I eagerly await my invitation to see just how much of a detriment this is. Some experts balk at the trend towards all inclusive sites, but I am not sure about my opinion on this and will reserve my take until we have seen the best of them. Perhaps Plum will be the exception to this perceived rule.

The way this site is laid out is exceptional, as you can see from the screenshot below. I selected a filtered web page of a news article from 30 something thousand choices. Plum has a the combined function of so many sites and allows for the maximization of the best from other sites, I simply do not see how it can fail to be very popular.