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.

What Twitchboard does is tie together different services on the social web and automates their interactions. Specifically, Twitchboard watches your Twitter stream and notices when you post a URL. It then automatically sends that link to your del.icio.us account. And, according to the company's homepage, they're working on connections to many other services for the future.

Blogger Chris Arkenberg says Twitchboard is a part of the "emerging class of cloud agents." These cloud agents, as he describes them, will help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. He envisions that soon we'll have many of these cloud agents, swarming around us, working on our behalf, helping to parse the data flowing in and providing us with the information that we need, separated from the noise.

If that's true, then we seriously can't wait. We hope that in 2009, we'll start seeing more of these smart cloud agents and less of those "yet another"apps. Developers, start your engines, it's time to build some real tools.

According to Microsoft, Thumbtack was developed based on user feedback the company received after releasing Listas in 2007. Unlike Listas, however, Thumbtack does not focus on social bookmarking but rather on creating online research collections. Thumbtack supports both IE7 and Firefox, though Firefox users miss out an a few interesting features.

One major disappointment of Thumbtack is its bookmarklet. While its concept of saving a full text copy of a site is great in theory (though not novel), the bookmarklet manages to mangle the text of the page with JavaScript and doesn't copy videos and images. The bookmarklet expects you to highlight the part of the text you want to save, though even then, you can't actually scroll through the text in the bookmarklet. One nice features, though, is that can also just copy and paste items into Thumbtack right from your web browser (or any other program, for that matter).

The actual Thumbtack site, however, is quite well designed and allows you to drag and drop items to different collections, edit and tag bookmarks, and share your bookmarks by email and through a public web site.

None of these features are novel, but the interface does make using the site very easy. One cool feature of the site is the 'gadget' view, which allows you to quickly plot addresses from all your collections on a map, or to create plots based on data in your bookmarks.

It is important to know, though, that Thumbtack is clearly still an alpha product. Sometimes, for example, the bookmarklet wouldn't recognize new collections we had created or published collections wouldn't appear on their respective public websites. That, however, is something we expect in an alpha product and can be easily remedied by Microsoft.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:6a905d98-0332-4c3f-8b25-75737cd9b675&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Thumbtack Introduction">Video: Thumbtack Introduction</a>

Better Alternatives

Earlier this week, we looked at Qitera, which has a feature set that is quite similar to Thumbtack's, but while Thumbtack has a more interesting user interface, the actual bookmarking and information retrieval through Qitera is far superior to Microsoft's product. Thumbtack also lacks any of the social bookmarking aspects that make Twine, Delicious, or Qitera interesting. Not everybody, of course, is interested in sharing bookmarks, and for those users, Thumbtack is definitely worth trying, though currently, we would recommend Qitera, Delicious, or Ma.gnolia, or the Google Notebook, over Thumbtack.

How to Use it

InSuggest for bookmarks is very simple. You enter your Del.ico.us username, it looks at your archive of bookmarks and then recommends other similar pages you might like to bookmark. You can filter by one or multiple tags you've used. Up to 20 tag filter options are provided but you can enter any tag you've used in your account.

You can run anyone's Del.icio.us username through InSuggest and get recommendations, not just your own.

The interface is very nice, it's one of the best uses of Ma.gnolia's Thumbshot.org that I've seen yet, and the whole thing feels fairly smooth. In fact, it almost feels too smooth. The recommendations come to you very, very quickly. No where on the site, or in response to our email inquiry so far, can we find an explanation of how it works.

Despite that, it does seem to work well. There are a limited number of ways to parse Del.ico.us data, though, and we wouldn't be surprised if there's just a touch of caching going on. It's hard to say, but the end result is good. InSuggest developer Dennis Gustafsson was elected "Engineering Hero" by The Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers last year, according to search blog Pandia. So someone's seen behind Gustafsson's work and liked it.

Continued below.

Our Recommendations

Beyond some clarity around process and perhaps basic instructions on use, there are a few other things we'd like to see from InSuggest. The first is a feed for future recommendations. The display is in Javascript so we haven't been able to scrape it yet. We'd also love to see a Greasemonkey script for displaying InSuggest recommendations on top of the Del.icio.us bookmarking popup, archive page and item pages.

Other features that would be nice would be the option to input a Ma.gnolia username instead of just del.icio.us, tooltips to display full item titles that are too long for the basic display and the ability to exclude particular domains from future recommendations. Some sort of user feedback to inform recommendations should be doable.

Finally, the biggest fish in the pond when it comes to Del.icio.us recommendations is user recommendations, not just item level ones. We'd like to see other users be recommended, ideally with those who tend to find items of interest earliest privileged on the list.

That may be too much to ask for, though. It's hard to say. Feeds and user recommendations are the kinds of gifts that keep on giving, though, and are far more compelling than one-off recommendations.

For now, though, we think InSuggest for bookmarks is worth checking out. You could very well discover some things there that are just the kind of thing you've been looking for.