Thursday, December 4, 2008

Bookmarking sites worth browsing




Half the fun of surfing the Internet is stumbling across tasty little web treats that you never would have thought to look for.

Traditional social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delocious are great for finding articles and other text that other web surfers have taed as interesting.

For the visually oriented , the pickings have been slim. Now, however, a handful of photo-oriented bookmarking sites are emerging to entertain the eye as well as the mind.

The sites - We Heart It, FFFFOund and Vi.sualize.us - resemble constantly changing art installations.
Similar to a while-walled gallery, they present their goods with little to no flouris : simple, clean interfaces are all that stand between visitor and eyefuls of colours.

The sites work similarly to their text-based brethren. When members discover an image worth preserving, they bookmark it , either by right clicking or using site-specific browser button. Here's a bit more about each of the sites.


FFFound:

Tokyo-based design firm Tha started FFFound as a side project in June 2007 . " We just genuniely wanted to share images that are considered good by a community of people." said Erica Sakai , a spokesperson for the company. "At the time , there were no Web sites that offered this kind of service.



Vi.sualize.us :

Victor Espigares , a software engineer is Spain , was flipping through a photographers's portfolio on the web when he was struck by a particular image. " I was thinking about bookmarking the picture-but not the site- and found that I had no choice," said Mr.Espigares. " So I started to think about filling that need."
Vi.sualize.us features more variety than the other sites : anythin from T-shirt to artsy studio shots and illustrations are likely to pop-up.


We Heart It :

Unable to land an invitation to FFFFound Fabio Giolito , a Brazilian web developer , created We Have It in March partially as an alternative to the exclusive site.

Unlike the other two visual-bookmarking sites. We Heart It also allows its 16,000 registered users to tag favorite videos from Vimeo and Youtube.


courtesy - DC

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