Bundlr shifts to become like Pinterest for curated media

The content curation website Bundlr has just announced a new version of its service which allows for embedding of content from a wide range of sources.

By partnering with Embedly the site now supports over 200 sources of content, including Storify, Pinterest and Amazon, for users to add to their bundles.

Embedly is the service that the new version of Twitter uses to embed photographs and articles in your Twitter stream and is used by a host of other sites such as Reddit and Bitly and comes as a WordPress plugin.

While Bundlr was originally seen as an alternative to sites like Storify, which can be used to create stories from curated links and content, Bundlr's focus is now on creating a top-level resource for curated content around a story or topic.

The native embedding is impressive as articles can be read in a simplified style, akin to Readability or Instapaper, and interactive content like Prezi or Slideshare presentations can be played from the Bundlr site.

Bundlr's Portuguese co-founder, Sérgio Santos spoke to Journalism.co.uk about the new features and how they came about.

"After we launched we looked at how users were using Bundlr and this was really diverse," he said. "They started trying to add links from Amazon and cover events with live streams. They started doing a lot of clipping, like when a product launched and they collected all the media coverage around it. We didn't really have support for those services, so the experience wasn't so great.

"Initially we targeted just journalists but what we found was that we had these other users who were not as tech savvy. We asked them why they were using Bundlr over something like Delicious and they said that being able to see the content rather than just save links was really useful to them.

"We're still targeting journalists as users. There's particular use cases related to journalism, for example if you're writing a story or blog post Storify is too bare. We had online newspapers who would use a bundle to grab the reactions on Twitter to a story they were covering and they would embed that bundle at the bottom of their story.

"We also see it as a research tool to collect sources. Rather than have multiple browser tabs open you can create a bundle, add articles, videos and pictures and quickly view the content."

Bundlr's new design is very visual and users of Pinterest boards will quickly grasp the idea of creating bundles. One clear advantage over Pinterest is the support for more than just images and links. When clipping various media Bundlr will pull an image for the tile but when clicked on this will display the full content.

Santos explains: "With Bundlr, users won't have to think about what it is they are trying to grab, we'll just support it. And on the other side, there are services like Instapaper, Readability or Pocket that only work well with articles. If I have an Instapaper list I can only use this to save articles but if I want to watch later a video someone posted on Facebook or a Soundcloud mixtape or a presentation, I can't do that on those services.

"We don't want you to worry about what you're using it for, it can work for any topic. We want to create a social map of interests. If you're researching a particular topic you can search within Bundlr for what people are already curating and so other users become your collaborators, rather than you having to start from scratch."

Bundlr was founded in 2010 and went live in 2011 after graduating from SeedCapital PT's 2H10 startup programme with €15,000 funding.

The Bundlr team came to one of last year's news:rewired journalism conferences. Here's how they used the service to cover the event.

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