A little while back, I met the guys from Evadoc, a Paris-based “Youtube for documents”. We talked for an hour about their activity, and at the end, I went on to give a few recommendations about how I thought it could differentiate its service from Websites such as Scribd.
One of those recommendations for Evadoc was to leverage Google Docs’ enormous bank of documents by enabling their users to create shareable docs seamlessly through Google Docs’ API.
Today, I uploaded a document on Scribd, and noticed the following:
Scribd now enables its users to create shareable documents directly by hooking to the Google Docs API. I think this is pretty awesome, mostly when you consider that it is awfully easy to download all of your desktop docs to Google Docs in the first place. This is a huge opportunity for companies that have lots of PDFs and docs in their private servers, and still don’t have a clue how to be more transparent online: Publishing some official company’s docs is one option.
The other option I liked was the plain text option: Just enter your text, and Scribd will create a shareable widget with your text in it. That is a tool that gets my SEO senses all excited.