Yudu Freedom hosts your PDFs, makes them SEO friendly
Yudu Freedom is a new entrant to the world of online document publishing. Like Scribd, it lets you take PDF files from your hard drive and host them online for free. The files can be viewed a little faster than with Adobe's Acrobat reader, and it runs entirely in Flash with that neat page turning effect you might have seen in other document hosting services such as Issuu and Idio.
Yudu promises that any document you upload will be search engine optimized, making it show up in Google, and so on. There's also a built in search tool, and a simple way to skip ahead to the page you're looking for using a thumbnail viewer. My favorite feature, however, is that you don't need to sign up to use the service. You can simply dump the files and leave your e-mail address and it will send you a link when it's done processing. In my test, it processed my six page PDF and sent me the link in less than a minute.
What Yudu is seriously lacking is support for other document formats and the capability to embed PDFs on third party sites. In comparison, Scribd lets you upload nearly any kind of file on it, then share it anywhere with its iPaper service which launched in February. Between the two I'd rather use Scribd simply because of this.
Yudu's document viewer is simple and fast, although you can't embed it on third party sites like you can with competitors. To view it in action simply click on the image above.
(Credit: CNET Networks)- Topics:
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Content and publishing
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Yudu,
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Scribd,
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Document publishing,
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PDF
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My name's Tom and I'm part of the team behind Freedom. Great to see that you've tried the software - and I'd like to thank you for the feedback! I agree with your points, particularly that it might be good to have other document formats supported (other than PDF). We'll be investigating all of the points raised in your review (and we tend to be quite fast at changes
Your point about embedding the edition on third party sites seems to be fairly simple in nature, we'll look at that right away.
Of note, if someone uploads a document in another format (for example, RTF or Word), the only issue for the person uploading tends to be fonts - for instance if they use Futura to write it, and that particular font isn't on the server - it will have to be replaced with an alternate. Of course, this might not be a big problem for people, but I'd be interested to know what you think of this?
Also, feel free to let us know at freedom@yudu.com if you have any other ideas - or points where we can improve the service!