Favo: A New Hot Bookmark Manager for 2009?
Earlier this week when we wrote about "The Perfect Social Tool," a commenter on the post hinted that a service called Favo may be it. Curious, we went to check it out. Well, Favo may not be the social tool we were dreaming of, but by all appearances, it does look like something we want to try. Although Favo hasn't launched yet, it appears to be an intelligent bookmark manager that could finally have us ending our relationship with delicious for good.
What's Favo?
We'll admit, we were intrigued as soon as we hit Favo's landing page - it was the screenshot of Favo in action that drew us in. With its bookmark browser that looks nearly identical to iTunes' cover flow visualization, Favo looked like the bookmark management tool we didn't even realize we were craving until it was right in front of us.
Over the past year, we've seen several search engines launch featuring visual browsing, but the closest we've seen to a decent visual bookmark manager was the Windows-only Tidy Favorites, and it only did thumbnail-sized screenshots. While visual browsing may look great, it hasn't proved to be a "Google killer" by any means. For search queries on the net, it seems text is still the way to go. However, when dealing with smaller data sets - like our albums in iTunes, for example - visual browsing can find its niche. It only makes sense to integrate this technology with our favorite bookmarks, too.
According to the Favo homepage, the new service will offer several other appealing features as well. Most notably, Favo claims it will be able to automatically label and tag your favorites based on its intelligent tagging engine. Finally! We're so sick of tagging! A service that does it for you is definitely worth a look.
Favo also promises fast search tools, recommendation and sharing features, groups and channels, synchronization between browsers, and even a curious automation feature they're describing somewhat vaguely as so:
"Your surfing experience does not get interrupted by dialogs that ask you to pause and organize the content you are collecting. Favorites are collected from your browser and from your friends' recommendations."
How well this will all work is anyone's guess, since the service hasn't even launched yet. But based on what Favo intends to do, it's certainly worth signing up for a beta invite.
Comments
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I hate tagging. So if this works, I will definitely make the switch. If they have an import feature to pull all my bookmarks from delicious, I'll throw a party that involves adult beverages and invite everyone over - my treat.
Posted by: Travis Robertson | December 26, 2008 8:02 AM
Looks sort of promising... but they completely ripped of Jive Software's website design :( That's just sad... http://www.jivesoftware.com/
Even the damn favicon is ripped off.
Posted by: Jerome | December 26, 2008 8:27 AM
Not more cover flow.
:(
Posted by: vale | December 26, 2008 8:34 AM
Wanted to note that they ripped off http://www.jivesoftware.com/, but seems Jerome beat me to it. :)
Posted by: Ivan Brezak Brkan | December 26, 2008 10:02 AM
I tried multiple times but never got into Delicious. I am, however, heavily invested in Diigo. I'm curious how Favo stacks up.
Posted by: sds.tumblr | December 26, 2008 12:40 PM
I'm not sure that I care about coverflow for my bookmarks. I suspect such a feature will bring a performance hit on netbooks. Auto-tagging could be useful but so far I have not seen any implementations that delivered on the promise. Features aside, it's all in the implementation of the user interface. A clumsy implementation would render the feature set moot.
Posted by: thegeniusfiles | December 26, 2008 3:10 PM
I'm glad to see (finally) a good and fitting name for a new product. At least I'll remember it right off the bat, not like del.icio.us, mento.info or diigo. :P
Posted by: enterthedragon | December 26, 2008 3:22 PM
Hate Tagging? I don't understand that sentiment. I use custom tags all the time with delicious to create RSS feeds. I wouldn't want to sacrifice that control. Also, being able to select from the tags of others is not only easy, it creates a semantic intelligence that I doubt will be beat by an "intelligent tagging engine." I'm all for progress, just not sure cover flow (which is not nearly as useful as a good description) and a tagging engine that might not do what I want qualifies.
Posted by: John C | December 26, 2008 5:21 PM
If you'd like to try a tool that's shipping now that will do many of the things Favo claims are coming, try Smub at http://smub.it.
You can bookmark, tag, save and share your web from any browser, anywhere.
Posted by: Janet Johnson | December 27, 2008 10:28 AM
Automatic tagging? Doesn't that defeat the point of a folkonomy?
Posted by: Andrea Hill | December 27, 2008 8:08 PM