Curated.by Launches Public Beta, Brings Collaborative Curation to the Web

Curated.by - a collaborative curation tool that helps users organize anything and everything with a link, from Wikipedia to Tweets to this here blog post - announced the launch of its public beta today.

The space is heating up, with Storify and Keepstream both making their own efforts, and it will be interesting to see how Curated.by's latest incarnation (it was previously a tool to curate Tweets) pans out in the burgeoning realm of content curation.

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Curated.by offered an introduction to the public beta on its blog today:

If you joined us early during our beta, you will notice that many things are different today. Not only did we changed our UI but also the way you collect, organize & discover content on curated.by.

The idea behind curated.by, remains the same. We are a growing collection of topics and interests, edited, organized and curated by everyone. A place that makes it easy to follow a specific topic or an evolving story, something that is still very difficult today.

Now, instead of dragging and dropping Tweets onto the Curated.by page, you tag content by bookmarklet or using a Chrome extension. Curated.by Founder Bastian Lehmann told The Next Web of the old "Bundler" tool that "Most people didn't like it, it was too much work".

We got in touch with Jim England, co-founder of Keepstream, who explained in an email that Curated.by, Keepstream and Storify are all "carving out unique niches on the manual curation front." Curation, he told us, is a space that is "definitely heating up", because as time goes on, users will start following more and more people until it becomes unbearable.

"There will reach a 'breaking point'", wrote England, "where many people will become frustrated with the amount of content they are missing from the firehose and will look to curated sources on particular topics to keep up-to-date."

Both Keepstream and Curated.by started out as social media curation tools, with the differentiation that Keepstream was more personal, while Curated.by was more collaborative. The most recent change - wherein Curated.by changed its focus to links - could be a step backwards.

"Our vision of curation is to connect to actions you are already doing on your social networks (favoriting, retweeting, and liking).  We think that these actions are already curation... individuals are screening and sharing only the best content with their networks, so why don't we take advantage of that?" wrote England, adding "Copying and pasting links is good for stuff you miss, but I don't think it should be the primary input method."

For us, the new incarnation of Curated.by reminds us of a Web we once knew, where content, including websites and not just tweets and Facebook "Likes", were organized into categories for browsing.

What do you think - will a more generalized form of curation, such as the one offered by Curated.by today, take off? Or should we stand atop the shoulders of Twitter and Facebook and go on with our curation from there?

The point may be as moot as whether or not curation is an inherently solo or collaborative effort. Perhaps there is room for both.

Discuss