MyTweetMag Blog

Curation: Created in Europe – Discussed in USA?

Currently we are facing a massive growth of curation tools, that are getting better and better. While my personal favourites are still the pioneer of social aggregation tweetedtimes (I think quite everything started with it) and the curation tool scoop.it, there are a lot of tools in stealth-mode which look promising:

I just read the fastcompany-article about percolate, a project that seems to follow the concept of scoop.it, but is based on twitter. And also today I stumbled upon the curation tool ingenic, that is on stealth-mode either. And don’t forget how many tools we have seen so far: pearltrees, paperli, curated.by, storify, storiful, mytweetmag (of course;-) and so on and so on. But when I have a look, where many of these startups are based and where they are discussed, I get one strange impression:

Many of these tools are located outside the usa and in europe, while the discussion about curation is mainly driven by the american (and english) web-intelligencia.

Let’s have a look:

• Readtwit – Yeah, nobody remembers this small service, but they did basically invent the principle of tweetedtimes and others. They probably failed because they produced only a rss-feed and not a webpage. The service was based in Israel.
• Tweetedtimes – This startup has been developed by a team in Moscow, as far as I know as a fun-release from a serious semantic-project. The managing-partner is from San-Francisco, I think.
• Paper.li – The team is from Switzerland
• Scoop.it – They are located in France
• Storify – Ok, this is from San-Francisco, but still very cool.
• Bundlr – They are from Portugal, indeed!
• MytweetMag – Yeah, I’m from Germany, Hamburg and Berlin, actually
• Pearltrees – They are from France, either
• …

I don’t want to check the location of all the new services and I know that there are a lot more very cool curation-tools from the us and uk. But I think it’s remarkable, that so many services are from europe while really nobody in europe (except uk) is talking about curation. Some month ago a well known german online-journalist has written a blogpost about curation and was quite excited about Rosenbaum’s book and this funny new movement. Well, nice try, but I think that this discussion has grown up elsewhere, allready.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a headline from the french seesmic-founder Loic Le Mer: “American Start-up Entrepreneurs Have Nothing To Learn From Europe” and he points on the old copycat-problem and the lack of global thinking. With curation, I don’t think that europe has a problem with copycats, but a massive lack of engagement in this discussion (and not only in this) …

I will post more regularly now to prepare you for the MyTweetMag-Relaunch. Because there is a lot to tell …