I love to bookmark, I have over 6,000 of them and counting. I use it a lot for mental bookmarking, logging articles and stories I will want come back and look at later. I occasionally use Instapaper or Read it Later. In fact I should use them more but I have so many accounts to handle, it is a pain to have my bookmarks in one place, my offline content in another. So, when I heard about Favilous, I had to check it out.
On first inspection Favilous just looks to be another social bookmarking tool that looks a bit sexier than Delicious. The fact that each bookmark will be logged with a Thumbshot, and the ability to change my background to a pretty picture were nice, but not really a killer reason for me to jump ship. However, the bookmark and read later function combined had me intrigued.
This is where it has the potential to get interesting. The ‘save to articles’ function allows me to save it offline to read later. I can read it on the site or on the mobile version of the site (not quite an app yet.) So, this looks quite appealing – to have my articles cached for reading and then the ability to bookmark them into the pile sounds like a great idea. I don’t ‘read it later’ because I am not organised enough to synchronise it before running out of the door. However, if I can bookmark and archive in one shot then thats got to be good.
This being a social bookmarking tool, I can share links directly to Twitter or to other friends on the site. Again, not unique features but important in today’s marketplace. The ability for me to find friends was a bit lacking on first inspection. I expected to find a Twitter or Gmail hook up to trawl my friends but this was not forthcoming. Hopefully this will be a future update.
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Like all bookmarking sites, this improves with time and content. With only a handful of bookmarks it only has limited appeal, but in time as I bookmark more it could be good. The discovery function also allows me to see what others are bookmarking which is good for inspiration. New features have been promised including the importing of my bookmarks from other places (all of them, not just the first thousand) which will also help.
As a young site, this has potential. I really like the combination of the archive and bookmark function and with some tinkering this could be well customised. The chicklet method of bookmarking, rather than browser plugins means the site is cross browser compatible and easy to use.
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