Using Favit

With a very simple interface, Favit displays one Twitter post at a time on the screen. After reading the tweet, you can flip to see the next one using a finger swipe. If you see a tweet you want to star yourself, just tap the giant star button beneath the tweet.

You can also swipe down on the tweet for more interactions. Doing so reveals the author and then lets you re-tweet their post or email it to someone. In addition, clicking on the "+" (plus) sign lets you add the author to a special Favstar.fm list, which is synchronized with your saved lists on Twitter. This allows you to build your own personalized list of favorite twitterers, accessible from Twitter.com or any other Twitter client that supports lists.

What's Missing

Although the iTunes app description notes that Favit has a celebrity and tech filter built in, we couldn't find these settings in the application itself. However, you can follow these pre-filtered lists via the Favstar.fm website's Leaderboard section. We hope this feature is coming to the application in an update, because it would be great to switch from the funny and entertaining tweets, over to the tweets from the tech- and social-media set, and then over to celebrities, depending on what interests you at the time.

Another missing feature from the application is one of our favorite features from the Favstar.fm website - the ability to see who has been favoriting your tweets. The Favit app could offer a quick and easy way to track those people and then add them to a list or follow them, but sadly it does not. Still, that's hardly a deal-breaker since Favstar offers RSS feeds for this purpose via their website. Besides, it's clear the app is meant to be more of a fun toy for casual users rather than a handy utility meant for data-obsessed folks like us.

If you want to check out the new Favit application (iTunes link), you'll have to fork out a little cash. Favit, unlike similar time-wasters including the above-mentioned FML and Cool Facts, doesn't come in free and pro versions. Instead, it's one price only: $2.99. That may seem like a lot for an app just meant to amuse you, but the next time you're terribly bored, you'll be glad you downloaded it.

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.

Mozilla has cultivated one of the most active and interesting developer communities around its products and seeing numbers like these will surely give a lot of other developers an incentive to try their hands at developing new plugins for Firefox as well.

Your Favorites

We asked our readers and Twitter followers about their favorite apps and, as expected, received a wide variety of answers. For web developers, Firebug was clearly a winner, though a lot of you also mentioned Greasemonkey, the bookmarking plugin de.licio.us, and DownloadHelper. Other favorites included Ubiquity, and FoxMarks, AdBlock Plus (though we hope you disable it on RWW and your other favorite websites), and Tab Mix Plus.

Our Favorites

Among the RWW staff, Sarah Perez listed the magazine-style RSS reader Feedly and the FFHolic Toolbar for FriendFeed users as some of her favorites.

Rick Turoczy is a big fan of the CoolIris plugin that allows you to browse pictures and videos in a very pretty 3D environment, though he also likes Iterasi, which allows you to take live snapshots of any web page. (Disclosure: Iterasi is one of Rick's consulting clients, but he assures as that he likes it so much that would use it anyway)

Richard MacManus likes StumbleUpon and the Google Toolbar.

Other favorites among the rest of the staff here included ColorfulTabs, Evernote's Web Clipper, and the Google Notebook plugin.

Also, all of us at RWW try to use our sponsors' products, so we are currently checking out AdaptiveBlue's Glue as well.

Did We Miss Something?

These are just some of the plugins we and our readers are using (and we surely missed quite a few). Did we miss your favorite? Feel free to let us know in the comments.

There are tons of sites on the web that you want to tag and share with others, but there are also plenty that don't need to be out there for everyone to see. You don't need to socially share the link to your blog's administration page, for example, or the link to your local news and weather site. You certainly don't need to share the links to that weird health ailment you've been googling, either. Or perhaps you want to keep private the research you've been doing for an upcoming article on your blog.

Of course, you could just bookmark these pages using a web 2.0 service and set them to "private," but there's something to be said for having the links close at hand, available in only a couple of clicks from your browser's menu.

The only problem with using a browser's bookmark menu - the problem that the Web 2.0 bookmarking services meant to solve - is that when you have so many links saved, it becomes difficult to find them again. You even start to forget what you have in there. With delicious, Ma.gnolia, etc., this problem was dealt with by tagging favorites with keywords to make them more easily searchable.

Visual Search For Personal Bookmarks

While tagging may work for some, the new service from Tidy Favorites thinks they have a better way - visual search.

We've noticed visual search is a space that's heating up. There are iPhone apps and visual search engines galore. Even Amazon got in the mix with their new "window shopping" storefront.

Now you can take advantage of the power of visual search to browse through your own bookmarks, too. (Yes, we know Ma.gnolia uses thumbnails, but it's not quite the same.)

How Tidy Favorites Works

Tidy Favorites installs like desktop software, but functions as a browser plugin. If anything, it's more like Evernote than it is like a Web 2.0 bookmarking service. 

What makes Tidy Favorites easy to use is its simplicity. To bookmark a page, all you need to do is click the "Plus" button it adds to your browser toolbar. Then, to interact and organize your favorites, you just click the "Star" button.

The Tidy Favorites organizer will appear, pre-loaded with a tab that displays your "Top Links." These are the sites you visit a lot, similar to what both Opera and Google Chrome display when you open a new tab.

Uncategorized bookmarks reside in the Tidy Favorites sidebar, ready to be orgnaized. At the bottom of the dashboard, you can right-click to add a new tab. Then you simply drag and drop links from your sidebar onto that tab's page. The tabs at the bottom are very intuitive to use if, especially if you're familiar with Excel spreadsheets. Within each tab, you can also right-click to add folders to further categorize your favorites.

Other Nifty Features

Besides just organizing bookmarks, Tidy Favorites has a few extra features that make it stand out. One such feature is a cropping tool that lets you slice out a piece of a web page and save that as the visual thumbnail for the site. For example, if you regularly visit a page to see your local forecast, you could slice out the part that just shows the weather, instead of creating a thumbnail of the entire page.

Using this option, you could make a dashboard of at-a-glance information within one of Tidy Favorites' tabs. When you think of all the different ways you could use this tool, you'll realize that this feature could actually be an improvement on using dashboard-like homepages where data comes from pre-designed widgets and RSS feeds.

Tidy Favorites is also portable, so if you want to take your links to go, you can add them to a USB drive.

The Not-So-Good Stuff

One feature of the software that really needs to work well is the built-in search box. Using the search function, you should be able to easily search your bookmarks by entering in a keyword or search term, then click "Google," "Images," or "Wiki" (Wikipedia).  When using the Google option, it will by default search your favorites like a Google Custom Search Engine would. But upon testing this, it wasn't finding some links saved even though I used good keywords. It seemed to be returning Google search results, but it was supposed to be searching the bookmarks only. Obviously, this is a critical feature that still needs some work.

Another big problem is that, unfortunately, this software is currently Windows-only. The page that it displays is saved on your computer itself, as its URL starts with your local IP (127.0.0.1). Why this can't be ported over to Mac or Linux is unknown, but we hope they are working on it.

We'll keep our eye on Tidy Favorites for now. It's still rather new, so we'll let them iron out some of the kinks we saw. They still have minor usability tweaks to make like deleting thumbnails from the sidebar after they're dropped in a tab. We think the bookmarks should automatically arrange themselves on the page, too. If they can fix these problems, we could definitely see this as being a great tool for organizing sites, but it's clear they're not quite there yet. So until then, it's back to Evernote for us.

Gender is an important lens through which people communicate and that's still the case online. Below are links to some of our favorite women bloggers and some favorites from some web celebs you may or may not know. We hope you'll visit their sites and add more of your favorites in the comments.

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Many of my favorites were named by the people below, but a few unique ones include:

Anastasia Goodstein, founder of YPulse, a blog about marketing to youth that even non-marketers will enjoy reading.

Marjolein Hoekstra of CleverClogs, my RSS mentor.

Orli Yakuel, Go2Web2.0, frequently finds web apps first.

Laurel Papworth, SilkCharm, a fabulous Australian social media consultant I've just recently discovered.

Photo: Orli Yakuel, by Yaniv Golan

Sarah Perez

RWW writer Sarah Perez says our own Corvida is her favorite woman blogger, but she's got a list of others she likes a lot as well.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, from Profy, a leading news blog about life online and promotion for the Profy blogging platform. Svetlana Gladkova, who writes on Profy.com as well as the Profy Development Blog is also one of Sarah's favorites.

Tamar Weinberg, Techipedia, is an internet marketing rock star and a repeat selection by several people asked to make a list for this post.

Veronica Belmont is a blogger and video blogger all over the internet.

Natalie Del Conte is a blogger and video blogger for CNet/CBS.

Gina Trapani leads the fabulous blog LifeHacker

Emily Chang writes and publishes all kinds of different sites, including PicoCool and eHub. Her design company created the most recent design for RWW.

Leah Culver is a founder of standards-happy microblogging platform Pownce.

Kara Swisher writes for All Things D and is one of the most powerful people on the web.

Sarah Lacy is a business writer, author and blogger focusing on tech.

Wow, what a list!

Photo: Sarah Lacy, by Brian Solis

Frederic Lardinois

RWW's Frederic Lardinois was a little late to the game, so many of his favorites were already taken by Sarah above (whose weren't?) - but here's a few folks he's adding to the list.

Susan Mernit used to work at Yahoo! Personals, is rumored to be working on a secret startup project and has lots to teach all of us about the social media space.

Xeni Jardin writes for weird-hunting blog BoingBoing and publishes media all around the world and web.

Lorelle VanFossen writes Lorelle on Wordpress, a leading source of education about using WordPress and about blogging in general.

Photo: Susan Mernit, by Brian Solis

Friends of ReadWriteWeb

Why stop at just our list? We asked a few other people to contribute. We hope you'll add your list of favorites in comments as well.

Matt Mullenweg is the creator of WordPress and another fan of Lorelle on Wordpress. He also named three other bloggers that were new to our list.

Kathy Sierra teaches people about usability and design. More than a year after a gender-based campaign of harassment led her to stop posting to her blog, Sierra remains a public speaker in high demand and one of many peoples' favorite bloggers.

danah boyd is an academic researching the culture of youth on social networks. If you've ever got some free time and want just one blog to read - hers is a good choice.

Tara Hunt is a marketing consultant and author. She blogs at Horse Pig Cow about how businesses can thrive in the changing online world.

Holly Ross

Holly Ross is the Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, NTEN. Her must-reads include:

Nancy Schwartz's Getting Attention, all about new media marketing for nonprofit organizations.

Michelle Martin's Bamboo Project is a blog about personal and proffesional development for knowledge workers.

Charlene Li is an outbound analyst at Forrester and co-author of Groundswell, a book and a blog about how big business can transform itself to engage in the social web.

Beth Kanter is a nonprofit tech consultant who has worked with nonprofit arts and community-based organizations for over twenty-five years. Words can't describe Beth's awesomeness.

Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer is the CTO of Creative Commons, a global organization working to create alternatives to traditional copyright law. His favorite bloggers include:

Wendy Seltzer is a technology law blogger who writes about Intellectual Property Rights.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a blogger.

Michelle Thorne is a thinker, about free culture and a whole lot more.

Carolina Botero is a Colombian blogger who writes in Spanish about Free Culture and technology.

Curt Hopkins

Curt Hopkins is the founding editor of The Committee to Protect Bloggers, a blog and organization dedicated to protecting bloggers around the world from imprisonment, censorship and other offenses at the hand of authoritarian governments. Curt didn't hesitate for a moment before pointing us toward the following bloggers.

Esra'a Al Shafei is a 21 year old blogger from the Kingdom of Bahrain. She writes at Mideast Youth and at FreeKareem.org, a blog dedicated to agitating for the freedom of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman.

Israel-Canadian freelance writer Lisa Goldman writes about Israel and media.

Sokari Ekine is the founder of Black Looks, a blog about Africa, women in Africa and a whole host of other topics.

Who Are Your Favorites?

The blogs above are just a few of the many that are written by women leading public discussions about technology and many other topics online. Now that it's time for this year's Blogher conference, we'd love to take the opportunity to discover more excellent women who blogs. Who are your favorites?