Scribd - Social PDF Sharing, Oh Joy!

Okay, I'll admit that the idea of a socially-driven site built around sharing documents doesn't sound terribly enticing, but I have fallen in love with Scribd. Scribd has a great design and a surprisingly simple and low-key method of embedding document files (support for .doc, .lit, .pdf, .ppt, .ps, .txt, .xls) within websites via their special flash player.

Scribd
Scribd's homepage actually looks nice.

TechCrunch calls it YouTube for documents and in that respect, Scribd kicks ass. I love reading the occasional tech book and Scribd just might be a great way to discover such books, read them online and send them to friends. Just like YouTube, however, we will definitely see some for-pay PDFs and documents show up on Scribd, but what else is new. I'd suggest browsing Scribd for interesting content.

One thing that is cool about Scribd but makes me wonder why they even bothered is the section of traffic analytics on the bottom of the document pages. It shows interesting stats about that particular document, including the location of each visitor and fancy graphs for page views and uniques. They did, however, misspell the word "referrers".

Scribd Traffic Analytics
The last view in Atlanta, GA was me.