Earlier this week when we wrote about “The Perfect Social Tool,” a commenter on the post hinted that a service called Favo may be it. Curious, we went to check it out. Well, Favo may not be the social tool we were dreaming of, but by all appearances, it does look like something we want to try. Although Favo hasn’t launched yet, it appears to be an intelligent bookmark manager that could finally have us ending our relationship with delicious for good.
What’s Favo?
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 severalsearch 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.
