Company

about

Trails.by is a platform for collecting curated lists in a hybrid of Q&A + social bookmarking. We aim to solve the problem of too much info by making it easy to find AND be a curator.

There is, of course, a category of websites for curating, collecting and sharing bookmarks and a category of websites for Q&A. Bookmarking sites include Pinterest, Delicious, Diigo, Pinboard and a few others. These sites have no 'guiding question', and serve mainly as an efficient, safe way to store and share your bookmarks. Q&A sites include Quora, Yahoo Answers, and the StackExchange network, among others. They depend heavily on crowd-sourced text answers by volunteers who write and rank the responses. Each of these categories are used by 10s of millions of users daily.

To expand that a bit, Trails.by bridges the categories of Q&A sites and social, curated bookmark sites with Requests (the Qs) and Trails (the As) on one site. Trails are improved from standard social book-marking because Trails are the set of sites chosen to answer a particular question, as opposed to the unspoken generic question of traditional bookmarking/pinning sites, and because Trails offer a clear sequence and a visualization, including 'main' and 'tangent' links to help you find your way.

In many scenarios, the issues is not a lack of information, it is making it easier to find the right information, and in the way I like to receive it. Trails are curated bookmarks that answer specific questions, posed by the Trail creator, or by fellow internet citizens.

Overall, we favor relevance over speed for closing the Q & A loop, so on the backend, we track and analyze almost all the user's interactions, including Trails you follow, rate, comment or clone, URLs you keep in your library, and more. Additionally, we have a fairly traditional quiz, but because we use relative strengths rather than any absolute number, we can build a meaningful profile which allows us to increase relevancy after just a few questions.

One of the nice things about Trails.by is the structure of the URLs, which amplify your branding, and make it very easy to understand who curated the Trail. Soon, we envision organizations asking their customers to "Find your way at Trails.by/MyBrand" as commonly as they now say "Like us at Facebook/MyBrand." Examples: http://trails.by/sxsw -->the easy-to-share, remember or guess public page for your trails http://trails.by/sxsw/best-indie-bands-to-see-in-2012, --> a Trail Overview page http://trails.by/sxsw/most-inspiring-entrepreneurs-panels/6 --> the 6th node in that trail.

It is also possible to create a sandboxed version of Trails, which means a version of Trails whcih could be public or private, but where are the trails are focused on one domain, as decided by the sandbox owner. A sandbox url would be http://sxsw.trails.by instead of http://trails.by/sxsw Other examples could include http://sxsw.trails.by/film, http://sxsw.trails.by/music, and the Trails themselves, for example, http://sxsw.trails.by/interactive/10-must-see-panels-for-2012 and many many more.

All URLs are easy to share on Facebook, Twitter, or email, and each Trail has been SEO tweaked for optimal Google-ability.

Find Your Way with Trails.