Blogging Tips

Favilous is a UK based startup built on ASP, .NET & AJAX. It’s a very simple social bookmarking site that adds the ability to add your own “backdrop”. Bookmarks are setup in a way that saves space so that you can see more of them on the page at one time. Because of the UI, I can also see Favilous being used as your browser home/start page featuring your most used and favorite links.

To get the best out of Favilous while browsing the web, you’ll need to use one or more of their “bookmarking tools”. As you can see from the screenshot below, there are 4 different types of bookmarklets that you can use – FavHome, FavitNow, FavitLater and TweetLink. You can also use these tools from your iPhone or iPod Touch in order to sync your Safari bookmarks.

Upon signing up you have the option to create default categories and links by choosing from 6 different categories. The categories you choose will then be displayed grouped together on your home page along with 3 default sites (which are removable). You can then add new links to your categories, open all links in a particular category in new tabs, or edit the links in each category. When adding links you have the option to make them private; all default links are private as well. You can also delete a whole category or add new ones. I noticed that the category groups (which look kind of like widgets) cannot be moved around; I’d really like to be able to rearrange those.

The flower-like icons you see above are used to edit the link, forward it to another user or tweet it. This is also where you can change the category it belongs to. This can be done for all bookmarks – even ones you haven’t personally added. So if you see a URL on someone else’s page, you can easily add it to one of your own categories or tweet it.

The Favilous sidebar shows you featured sites, Favilous Buzz (recent activity), hot sites and top sites. This is great for seeing what others are bookmarking. One thing I find annoying is that whenever you use the search page to find a user, the Favilous Twitter page opens up in a new tab; one time is ok but not every time. This could just be a bug though. The community page is where you can see in detail what was bookmarked, by who and when.

As far as settings, you can make your profile public or private. You can choose whether or not to show icons next to your bookmarks. This can help save page load time. You can add a profile image and 25 character description (that’s really short though – more like a title). A unique feature that Favilous offers (as I mentioned briefly above) is the ability to change your backdrop/background. They have a few to choose from or you can upload your own. This gives the site a personal touch and social networking feel.

At this point and time, Favilous is very new and not very active but I do see it as a potentially useful site. Thoughts?