While we’ve waited with bated breath for the release of Delicious 2.0 (Yahoo’s been teasing us for months), Ryan Sit, the creator of Swurl, a recently launched startup that offers a lifecasting aggregator for web activity, has been toying around with the Del.icio.us API to bring us FavThumbs. FavThumbs offers a visually-pleasing web application to view screen shots of your bookmarks.
Through the site, users can input their Del.icio.us ID, and then browse their bookmarks in a grid or a coverflow-like display. Sit hopes that the site will offer a much better alternative to the out-dated Del.icio.us list. A similar app that was we covered last year is Fichey. Fichey acts like a microfiche for headlines from social bookmarking sites. Users can flip through the pages like a magazine, but they are only the headlines, not user-specific.
Another similar service is SearchMe, a visual search engine we covered in June. SearchMe offers the ability to drag and drop sites to bookmark into “stacks.” The bookmark stacks are shown in a coverflow-style display, similar to FavThumbs. A similar Del.icio.us coverflow display is seen with the Fluid Del.icio.us Site Specific Browser plug-in (mentioned here).
Sit says that he was inspired by the desktop client Delish, a graphical bookmark desktop client. Another app created by Sit is ListPic, an application to browse local classified pages through a calendar-like display. Both ListPic and FavThumbs are both experimental applications from his company Freestyle Labs.
The grid and carousel view switching is awesome
Similar to iTunes playlist scrolling..
Good one!
Why is everyone so obsessed with Coverflow for websites and browsing via screen shots in general? It seems kind of neat for a few minutes but it’s so far from usable.
Thank you for the great review TC!
@Jacob, I totally agree with you on the coverflow thing. We just added it because it looked cool and there was some quick open source code to do it
I still don’t find it too usable.
On the other hand, the grid view with just screenshots, is actually really useful. You really need to try it with your own bookmarks to really feel it. It helps because humans are able to browse and recognize things more quickly visually. For example a lot of the time you can find a bookmarked website much faster by how it looked rather than it’s website title.
Yeah, I could see thumbnail view being useful but less so if you have a huge amount of bookmarks saved. I’ve never even found actual OS X Coverflow all that useful.
On a related note, that “SearchMe” search engine just seems ridiculous.
Not very original. This is similar to what was done by yourminis.com with their digg expose mashup.
I already spent too much time on the web, for example reading TechCrunch
To save some time I prefer reports about tools like Basecamp or iMacros, not tools or sites that waste more time
Ryan,
did you use any open source package for taking the screenshots of the web pages? I was gonna do some research on that, but would be great if you could point me to the right direction.
Its nice to see how much the community has contributed to developing these tools to increase the user experience. I always keep track of these new del.icio.us tools at Absolutely del.icio.us, maintained by a user.
Really interesting, quite similar to Web2Wave (http://www.web2wave.com).
Ryan, screenshots are made with http://www.thumbshots.org
When you sign up, it doesn’t let you use capital letters in the URL, despite the fact that URLs are not case sensitive. Why?!?!
Other than that, I fail to see how this is any different than the links-of-the-day that are automatically posted from del.icio.us to my wordpress blog.
Just another pointless aggregator.
It’s all very cool looking ,all coverflow and visual.
I’m not sure want the value add is for me, but I am considered about why they need were (optionally) asking for my Delicious password since that is not needed to get my public bookmarks.
Here is a productivity google gadget which helps you to preview the delicious bookmarks. You can also add or remove tabs for the tags of your interest.
http://www.google.com/ig/direc.....module.xml
Jay: That’s a good list, and we also maintain a list of the most popular tools at http://del.icio.us/help/thirdpartytools — including Thumblicious, an earlier neat thing like this.
I don’t have a Del.icio.us account, but I’m now going to sign-up just to use this neat feature. I have tons of bookmarks, this will certainly help me get through the sites I’m looking for much easier.
@britta, anyway we could get Favthumbs on http://del.icio.us/help/thirdpartytools ? That would be cool. Britta, let me know if you have any suggestions for Favthumbs since you work at del.icio.us!
Gosh… the influence of apple across all websites and products is crazy. This is the same type of scroll that you find on ipods or on itunes. I don’t know if apple originated this type of interactive display but they are sure known for it…. http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
what i want to know is, when is del.icio.us going to let you include your bookmark notes on RSS feeds embedded in blogs / websites? for that matter, when are they going to get rid of the obnoxious character limit on bookmark notes? i’d rather they get to that more basic stuff than give me screenshots…
Actually I like the text only version of del.icio.us