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Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document
- there 18y agoi wonder how many of those visits resulted in a comment on the referring page complaining about scribd and asking for the actual pdf...
- axod 18y agoThis is sad news. Just when you thought flash was dead for all but video, it's now being used to show text.
- marketer 18y agoHave you ever thought about using flash for your web chat service? I'd actually prefer it over standard javascript, especially because it would have a real socket connection. Also, flash has pretty good support for text rendering. You can embed any font into any swf file, and it has anti-aliasing and effects. There was a presentation about the new flash 10 text features recently - http://is.gd/ejKj http://is.gd/ejKj
- axod 18y agoFrom a user point of view, why do you care if it has a real socket connection, or a emulated connection that does exactly the same thing? I'm not sure any user anywhere would notice the difference. There is no noticable difference in terms of latency, negligible difference in terms of bandwidth. I have thought about the possibility of using it where available, but I don't think it'd really be worth the effort and potential issues. Fair enough for text rendering, but html is getting better font rendering also. I know which I'd put my money on. I can't even select the damn text on scribd.
- mattmaroon 18y agoThe problem with HTML is there's a decade lag between when the new font rendering is introduced and when you can rely on it to be accessible to all of your customers.
- axod 18y agoTrue, although I think things are speeding up. Chrome, firefox, safari, emergence of the iPhone as a browser... HTML5 is definitely heading in the right direction though. WebSocket will be awesome when it arrives, making comet a thing of the past. <video> and <audio> tags will pretty much put flash out of business, etc etc
- marketer 18y agoThe more browsers that exist, the more stakeholders there will be in HTML 5, and the longer it will take for it to be implemented across the board. And if the process is anything like ECMAScript, it could literally take a decade. Flash does everything you need for rich media, now. Sorry, but flash is never going away. There's Youtube and advertising networks that will guarantee its ubiquity.
- mattmaroon 18y agoI agree things are speeding up, but think it's largely because Microsoft is now realizing that they need to keep IE up to date and standards compliant. They still have 70%market share, and it's not shrinking fast, so the onus is entirely on them. IE7 is kind of a sucky browser but a step in the right direction in terms of compliance, and IE 8 will be much better.
- axod 18y ago70% might be true in some places, but it's changing a lot. For example, Mibbit gets about 19% IE usage on the main client. On the widget as you'd expect that figure is higher - 30%. The surprise is how well chrome is doing these days - usually beating Opera and Safari, and sometimes beating IE6. I think most of the push is coming from firefox,chrome,safari and opera. People using the new wave of webapps aren't using IE, because it's ridiculously slow (Even GMail now deter the use of IE). I'd say it is shrinking very fast in webapp early adopter circles, and that's a key area of growth for browsers. IE better up its game with IE8, or get left behind.
- abstractbill 18y agoThe real place I could see Flash being great for mibbit is it would allow you to build an embed that could be used on sites like Myspace which allow Flash but not Javascript content. Let me know if you ever want me to show you how to get a sane Flash dev environment set up - I have the war-wounds from writing most of Justin.TV's Flash code ;-)
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y agoMake it a blog post of some sort? I'd read it.
- lackbeard 18y agoI'd be interested in reading that as well.
- hapless 18y agoI realize that someone, somewhere, is running webtv and would love a service like Scribd. That person is not able to use it because it's a flash and javascript nightmare. The rest of us, who have regular PCs with the modern software that scribd requires, have document readers for all of the various file formats. The very worst of these readers is faster and more pleasant to use than the best scribd rendering. Lastly, as usual, TechCrunch measures success in terms of users and investor capital. Ask yourself: Does it really make sense to measure the success of a free hosting service in terms of unique users?
- trapper 18y agoI think it does, IF your goal is acquisition. Adobe must be their prime target in my opinion, google wouldn't (too much js focus).
- jasonkester 18y agoScribd is a cool service run by cool people, and I'm happy they managed to scrape together enough funding to keep going for a while longer. But then possibly I'm biased, because without them we'd be forced to roll our own pdf/doc/xls/ppt viewer to stick inside of Twiddla. As it is, Scribd is just about a perfect fit for us off the shelf. But you're right. They've got a bit of an oldskool business model that sort of relies on Google buying them at some point. I hope things work out for them.
- zain 18y agoMan, you guys are harsh. Even if it isn't a service you yourself would use, why bash a service useful for others? The first goal of many Y Combinator startups is to make something people want, and Scribd clearly fits the bill if millions of people are using it.
- cstejerean 18y agoYes, millions of people are using it for reading pirated ebooks.
- mattmaroon 18y agoPG didn't say "build something legal that people want".
- axod 18y agoI disagree. ONE person decides to use scribd to show some text on techcrunch, and suddenly the whole readership of techcrunch are "users" of scribd? Measuring success in terms of pageviews in a passive widget isn't a good measure.
- Mazy 18y agoI highly doubt comscore is claiming to be tracking embed/widget traffic. Those numbers are supposed to be for the site itself. They are quantified, and quantcast shows the vast majority of their traffic is to their destination: http://www.quantcast.com/scribd.com http://www.quantcast.com/scribd.com see scribd.com vs The Scribd Network
- axod 18y agoTrue, so people are linking instead of embedding. But the point is the same... If one person makes the decision to link to scribd instead of the pdf, and 100 people follow that link, it doesn't really mean 100 people value the service.
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- ajkirwin 18y agoScrew scribd. Give me something that converts pdfs into straight (x)html, and I will be happy.
- jawngee 18y ago> soffice -headless -accept="socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=8100;urp;" -nofirststartwizard > java -jar jodconverter-cli-2.2.1 yourpdf.pdf yourpdf.html Happy now?
- justin 18y agoFuck the haters. Scribd is awesome because it's a great utility for easily sharing your shitty Word docs and PDFs, and there is obviously demand for it as Scribd and all the Scribd-like knockoff sites each have more users than your worthless websites. Complaining about Scribd putting text in Flash is like complaining about how ugly Myspace pages are: while you were out bitching, a few talented people were out giving the masses what they wanted, no matter how many standards got violated, and will subsequently get paid for it.
- schoudha 18y agoYes, Scribd has had great success and everyone in the HN community should be happy for them. However, there's a legitimate criticism to the direction Scribd is taking - it's arguably bad for the web. What is the mission? All documents are created offline, uploaded to Scribd and displayed via iPaper? I think we already have a great framework for distributing text information - HTML (Although Scrib's traffic may indicate otherwise). It's flexible, it's fast, and it can be viewed on any device, it can be indexed easily, etc... Think about how much better nytimes.com is then the New York Times newspaper. Instead of creating new standards, the industry should be trying to help people create HTML formats as first class objects. With that said, it would be really cool to bring all the books/magazines from the past to the internet (books.google.com).
- axod 18y agoIf they get bought, I'll gladly eat my hat. If they become profitable by sharing documents free, whilst expanding the documents size massively by wrapping it in flash, I'll eat another hat.
- unalone 18y agoSo, wait. If they become profitable WITHOUT being bought, you still eat two hats? Or are they entirely separate hat affairs?
- startingup 18y agoI will be charitable here (you can tell I am not a huge fan either!). I have seen a couple of people use the site, and they use it to publish short stories and such. They could always post it to a blog, but I think Scribd gives them nice search engine optimization. Even for this legitimate use case, the flash player is a bit of a turn-off for me. But the reason I am not a huge fan is the sheer extent of copyright abuse going on there. Turning a blind eye to it - hiding behind DMCA really - is not kosher, and I frankly wouldn't want to do business that way, no matter what the profit.
- captainobvious 18y agoGuess you are anti-ISP too?
- startingup 18y agoExactly the response I meant by "hiding behind the DMCA". To call Scribd an ISP is a stretch. They pretty much invite anyone to upload anything, and it is not clear they take any step to take out copyrighted content (entire books can be found there) until someone sends a DMCA notice. An ISP is a transmission service, while Scribd is a stateful, long lasting, very search-engine optimized storage service. An ISP doesn't by design intent (SEO!) carry traffic to copyright infringing content. Some day a distinction like that could come back and bite them in the ass, but their hope must be to "exit" before that happens.
- snprbob86 18y agoFlash provides a PDF viewer component. I'd like to use it because I intend to adorn documents on my pages with additional controls and interactions. I can't inject my own UI and logic into your desktop PDF viewer. Unfortunately, this Flash component only handles PDFs, not the wide spectrum of document formats. If I could reliably convert Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, etc. server side to PDF, then I would be a very happy boy. Does anyone know of any such software that can do this? I doubt Scribd would be the one to provide it, but I would really love a simple `anything2pdf` that "just works": `cat foo.doc | anything2pdf > foo.pdf`