Launched in the Netherlands in 2007, Symbaloo is a portal that lets you organise and collate your favorite Web bookmarks in your own personal online ‘Webmix’, something which is comparable to folders that group together topic-specific URLs.
The premise thus far has been pretty simple – you bookmark a site directly through your online Symbaloo account by tapping and adding new tiles, or through clicking the little bookmarker in your browser (available for Firefox and Chrome), which automatically adds the site to your favorites.
Whilst the site has previously been optimized for mobile, today sees the official launch of Symbaloo’s native mobile apps to make it easier to centralize and manage your bookmarks across all your devices, with all bookmark updates synchronized automatically wherever you access your account.
Available to download for free on iOS and Android, the app has been beautifully put together, and follows a similar tiled approach to its Web-based counterpart. The one thing that could’ve made this app better, however, is a feature which enables users to easily add a bookmark whilst browsing any mobile site on their smartphone.
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As it stands, there’s no way – from what I can tell – to add a favorite from a third-party browser. You must access the Web from within the Symbaloo app, either by tapping to add a new tile – which requires you to manually enter a website’s URL – or by searching Google directly through Symbaloo’s built-in browser:
As it happens, the search functionality within Symbaloo’s browser isn’t all that bad so this isn’t a deal-killer, but it would be nice to have a little more flexibility over how I access the Web in the first place, as I don’t always know when or where I’ll need to bookmark a site. For this, I may have to continue to use Pocket to save sites to access again later.
However, if you do most of your browsing through a computer, you may have little requirement to bookmark directly on your mobile device anyway, meaning your Firefox/Chrome bookmarker could be all you need to ensure your favorite sites are accessible everywhere.
About Symbaloo
Symbaloo has two offices – one in the center of Delft, Netherlands, and the other in California. As for the company’s success so far, we’re told that it recently surpassed 6 million visits per month, with the majority of its growth coming from the US. Both Symbaloo and its mobile apps are free to use and are available in five languages – Dutch, French, Spanish, English and German.
“Making bookmarking easily accessible on any device is a niche that has yet to be fullfilled,” says Klaas Lameijer, CEO of Symbaloo. “It saves time and unnecessary irritation. Voice, single point access and smarter tiles is our next focus.”
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