Browse Del.icio.us Bookmarks Visually With FavThumbs

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.