Scribd / iPaper - Product Review

Like GigaOm, I am more in favor of ease in sharing documents online and review quickly. If your interest is in sharing document files and let people review or access files immediately across geographical locations almost instantaneously, then Scribd - iPaper is for you. I finally decided to give it a try, and given below are my observations, both on the merits and demerits. Also, I have listed my set of suggestions that could improve the product.

Good Selling Points based on my observation

• Indexing is simpler
• Streaming document viewer - iPaper (previously used FlashPaper, but then subsequently created a new technology based on Flash that gives PDF a run for its money)
• Additional features like embed code (to embed in your own blog/site), share, social bookmarks, download etc
• Another nice feature is upload from URL
• Traffic analytics is good
• The document is available almost instantaneously when compared to docstoc.
• Upload - Approve - Publish : Small steps towards sharing documents. Nothing complex
• Availability of API to help websites to build their own scribd-like functionality is a very unique idea. This extends the use of Scribd beyond the home website of scribd and expands the use of the technology.
• Very small footprint when compared to Adobe Reader.
• And Yes, Free Unlimited Storage!

Streaming Server - Observations (at various time instances during my evaluation):

• Uploaded a PDF file and tried to stream view it. Streaming viewer opens quickly. The PDF pages were visible after a minimum of 2 pages were streamed.
• Similarly uploaded a PPT, and streaming viewer started displaying the slides only after 3-5 slides were downloaded.
• When the ‘Full Screen’ mode was initiated, streaming of document started again from first.

Observations that felt a little strange:

• Uploaded a file, it showed as if it was uploading and then suddenly went to the ‘Approve’ step but said “No documents to approve”. This happened more than a few times. I was using 2 MB to 3 MB size files.
• Even though it said there was no document to approve, when I went to the documents list, the file was listed with a ‘need approval’ tag. So there is probably a problem with the upload and some kind of wrong checksum before going to the next step of approval and publishing. This is something that needs to be fixed.
• When uploading a 4 MB file, it returned an error, showing that there was a conversion error. So I uploaded the same file again. The doc list, after successful second try, listed the same file two times.
• Deletion of files (through delete option) from the list didn’t seem to remove the files from the list. Only a Refresh(F5) seemed to do the job.

Suggestions for improvement - General:

• Customizable categories like the current customize options found in a personal blog.
• Categories like tag cloud would be better than having to scroll.
• Progress bar is pretty confusing. Not sure if the upload is in progress or has been completed. Progress bar highlighting the percentage of upload completed will be good.
• When moving from streaming view in an embedded mode to a full srceen mode, the content should be extrapolated (re-used?) and not have to be requested again from the server.
• Subsequent streaming of same document from the same client should be faster. This should be possible with some kind of caching.
• Would be good if the whole website has a more obvious ‘AJAX’ feel.

Suggestions for improvement - Streaming Technology:

• It would be good to improve the streaming to be more content based than page or size based - meaning roll out(streaming dislay) content as its downloaded. For example, if there are 5 paragraphs in a page, the streaming display should be able to roll out line by line or paragraph or paragraph. This will surely be of significant impact.
• Probably the use of some kind of ‘Byte Range Caching’ technique used in the download managers should enhance the iPaper technology.

Tags: docstoc, iPaper, Scribd, Streaming Documents