Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document | Hacker News Reader

Scribd Had A Blowout Year, And So Did the Web Document

techcrunch.com

38 pointstrip50 comments

I 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?

I think it does, IF your goal is acquisition. Adobe must be their prime target in my opinion, google wouldn't (too much js focus).

What would Adobe do with it if they bought it?

I don't know. I'm not saying it would be a good buy! :)

Get sued for having acres of copyrighted content and pockets deep enough to justify the lawyers' fees?

Scribd 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.

About the speed issue - how is a 20 MB reader (Adobe Reader 9) plus the cost of downloading the entire pdf faster than a 200 kb swf file and having the document streamed? That makes no sense.

Half of the "documents" seem to be either plain text, or a plain image (porn).

The most viewed "document" on scribd of all time: http://www.scribd.com/doc/26896/SUING-FOR-TOO-MUCH-SEX

Do you think it's sane to "stream" that document? What the hell are these people thinking??? They're wrapping plain text inside flash. One can only imagine their warped mentality. Why not convert plain text to a video, upload it to youtube, and embed the video. It'd make about as much sense.

This is the modern version of people emailing each other Microsoft Word documents with photos in them. I never understood that either.

Well, I'm glad it's scribd paying the bandwidth bill to "stream" a 200 byte text file via a 200k flash player, and not me :)

That is because some corporate email systems block attached image files.

Not a fair comparison: you need a viewer for swf files too. Downloading is not a problem. If it takes 0.3 s on scribd vs 0.8 s with pdf, then I'm willing to wait to have a viewer that allows me to scroll with my scrollwheel.

What browser do you use? Scrolling with the wheel works fine in Scribd, at least in Firefox.

Not to be pedantic, but the Adobe Flash Runtime is tiny compared to Acrobat or Word, and effectively has a 0 startup cost.

Opera. Another reason why people shouldn't use Scribd: you have to register to download the pdf.

This is sad news. Just when you thought flash was dead for all but video, it's now being used to show text.

Have 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

From 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.

The 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.

True, 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

The 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.

I 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.

70% 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.

70% is true as an overall average. 90% is true in some places. Mibbit is very atypical, but even at 20%, you still have to support it.

That's the problem with browsers, you're always stuck with the lowest common denominator.

The 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 ;-)

Make it a blog post of some sort? I'd read it.

I'd be interested in reading that as well.

I 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.

Guess you are anti-ISP too?

Exactly 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.

i wonder how many of those visits resulted in a comment on the referring page complaining about scribd and asking for the actual pdf...

Man, 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.

Yes, millions of people are using it for reading pirated ebooks.

PG didn't say "build something legal that people want".

I 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.

I 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

see scribd.com vs The Scribd Network

True, 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.

The traffic isn't just from people following links. What about the people uploading 50,000 documents every day?

Source: Scribd says so, according to washingtonpost http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12...

True, although I'd guess a fair amount is webmasters trying to cross promote their content. Seems like if you own a porn site, you may as well post some "tasters" to scribd with your web address on, etc etc

That's true and so was your original argument, and both are true of YouTube as well. That doesn't make their traffic any less impressive. It's just using good viral spread mechanisms.

How about the 50k documents uploaded every day? Can you really question that Scribd is a product that a lot of people want to use?

From a quick look at the "most recent" page:

  20 docs per page, 50 pages covers last 18 hours.
  =1,000 docs in last 18 hours
  =approx 1,333/day

Maybe that page isn't showing every document, but I don't see why it wouldn't. And sure, it's new years, but even so...

Also you can't deny its used by webmasters promoting their websites....Posting endless tips etc with their link at the bottom. Take a look at some of the recently posted docs.

I don't believe they'd claim 50k a day if it were 1.33k. Something is wrong there.

Of course we're harsh. Start-ups are almost all extremely competitive, and the people who use start-ups are cutthroat capitalists. Everybody's looking for the absolute best things can get. I remember, two years before Tumblr launched, I would go between blogging platforms at the rate of one a week, pounce on every update, install and test every beta and every plugin, looking for a platform that would work well for me. I still do it with certain things. Any time a social network claims it's got something Facebook doesn't, I check it out. I'd like to think this isn't entirely unusual behavior here. People in this field are very often perfectionists.

With Scribd we're a mix of benevolent and indignant. Benevolent, because it's YCombinator. Indignant, because it renders text in Flash.In both cases, though, the response is the same. Benevolence isn't being kind and wishing good luck. Look at sites with that attitude, or real life institutions, and there you'll find the places where progress becomes stagnant. In order to encourage progress, it helps to have a bit of an edge. And it attracts the right people. I plan on launching a beta preview of my current project to members here, because I want to be ripped apart before anybody else sees this. I figure it'll do me and my partner a world of good.

Flash 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`

Screw scribd. Give me something that converts pdfs into straight (x)html, and I will be happy.

> 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?

Fuck 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.

Yes, 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).

If 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.

So, wait. If they become profitable WITHOUT being bought, you still eat two hats? Or are they entirely separate hat affairs?

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