Designing the next big web app
There are tons of social bookmarking sites around, all of them allow you to list your own bookmarks, share them, review them, sort them… Oh, wait, the last one was important. How do you sort your bookmarks? Do you tag them? Do you place them in folders? Or do you view them by date?
I believe that while this kind of sorting might satisfy the average user, it would help a tremendous amount if you could sort your bookmarks by colour. There is a huge graphic community out there that is always looking for inspiration. One should not need to remember the title of your bookmark or when you bookmarked it, in order to return to inspirational sites.
Your own personal sandbox
Once an user signs up for this new bookmarking service, he is given his own personal virtual sandbox, where he can shuffle around all his bookmarks. He can drag them, position them together, tag them and save these bookmark piles to return to them later.
In a way this works the same as Aperture’s Lighttables.
When you bookmark a site, a screenshot is automatically taken, which identifies this bookmark. When a site updates its visual layout, another screenshot is taken and saved on top of the initial one. If you desire to do so, you can of course also return to the previous one. Most importantly, high resolution screenshots are saved in an image history for all your bookmarks, so that no matter what happens to the actual site, you can always return to view your inspirations.
The thumbnails that are generated all have the proportions of an average browser window. The high resolution images, however, have the proportions of the actual site. The longer the site, the taller the image. This means that you can also look at that perfect footer from the site that is now offline. Just look in the image history of your bookmarks and scroll to the bottom.
All bookmarks are automatically colour tagged. If a website uses a lot of red, it gets tagged ‘red’ This way you can find them again later, even if you do not know what it was about or when you found it.
Personally, I have never been too thrilled by social bookmarking sites, since they did not offer me anything that my browser’s bookmarks folder could not also do. Therefore, I would like to know what you think of this idea? Would you sign up? Is it maybe already out there? What would you really like to see?
Depending on the feedback that I get, I might actually built this bookmarking site myself.
// kristarella
Monday, October 22nd 2007
at 1:16 AM
Great idea! I would sign up.
I would also be interested in being able to assign colours, not necessarily based on the site design. Do you think that will be available?
// Hamish M
Friday, November 9th 2007
at 18:14 PM
It’s an interesting idea, Dominik. I’m a frequent user of del.icio.us myself. And if there was some type of feature that could do what you’re saying, I would love it.
Sites don’t last forever, and for the ones that do, you could have the option of viewing the current version, or an archived screenshot.