We think our new shareable, collaborative libraries, a feature available in our Student Edition of scrible, are important enough to get a blog post of their own, so here we are! Previously, users were limited to a single, personal library. We are now enabling the ability to maintain multiple, separate libraries and also making them more friendly for sharing.

The new libraries allow you to interact with scrible in a more meaningful way than ever before. You can now keep topics of interest separated in a more concrete fashion, with each library keeping separate saved pages and tags. For instance, all of the pages saved for a research project can all be kept in their own library, separate from the pages saved for personal use. Tags you create in reference to 16th century literature won’t get mixed in with tags for great recipes and interesting reads.

We’ve also added the ability to share entire libraries instead of only individual pages. A teacher can now collect material on a topic, and share the entire library with students through one action instead of sharing multiple links. The library is also a living entity, so as pages are added or changed, anyone with access to that library will see the updates in real time.

Once you have the feature enabled, you’ll have an “Other Libraries” tab added to the top right of the main library interface. Clicking that tab will bring you to the library selection page, pictured above. Here is where you can select and manage your various libraries. The “Create New Library” will open the dialog to start a new library. The process is straight forward, just name and describe the new library and you’re all set to go. Once you’ve created the library, or click the “Manage” link, you’ll be brought to the “Manage Library” interface. There are three tabs, the first is the general tab. From here, you can edit the name and description of the library, just hover over either field and you can edit it right on the spot. This is also where to go in order to delete a library you no longer need.

The second tab is used to invite others to the library. You can enter a list of email addresses, separated by commas, and give them all access to your library in one fell swoop. Once you’ve done this the invited users will show up on the next tab, “Access & Permissions.”

This tab will show you all the users that have been invited and their permissions for the library. By default, invited users are set to only have “read” access. They can see the contents of the library, but cannot change, add, or delete content. The check boxes next to each name allow permissions to be set for each individual quickly and intuitively. You can also remove users entirely from the library by clicking the red “X” next to their name.

We are happy to announce that we are rolling out a shiny, new referral bonus program! There’s a new, big, red button at the top of your library labeled “Earn More Storage.”

This button will launch our invitation dialog so that you can tell your friends about scrible. In this dialog you’ll find a few ways to spread the word about scrible.

First, you’ll notice button to post to Twitter and Facebook. These buttons will launch a window to allow you to post to your social network of choice. In these posts will be a personalized URL as well as a default message. Feel free to change the message, but you’ll need to keep the URL intact in order to gain credit for these referrals. We also provide your personalized URL below these buttons which means you can use it anywhere on the internet you want.

Next is the option to import your address book from other services. We support import from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Plaxo, and AOL. Choosing any of these options will prompt you for your credentials to these services (which we throw away as soon as we’re done) and allow you to pick contacts from your address book on that service to invite to scrible.

Last is the option to manually enter email addresses. As you can probably piece together, this option provides you with a dialog to enter your own email addresses. After entering the desired emails, you’ll be able to fill out a custom subject and message to accompany the invitation email we’ll send them.

So what’s the point to all of this? Using any of these methods, if a user follows your link and signs up, we’ll keep track of it. If that user then continues to use the service and interacts (for now saving or sharing) with 3 pages and you’ve both verified your accounts, you both get a 25 MB boost in storage. You can earn this 25 MB boost up to ten times, bringing your total storage up to 375 MB for absolutely no cost to you or those you invite.