Zootool is a web-based bookmarking site offering some added perks over similar bookmarking sites. Do you want a better way to save your favorites other than in your browser? If you use sites like Digg or Delicious to save your bookmarks you will want to read on.

Visual

What I like about Zootool is how visual it is. I have used sites like Delicious pretty frequently. To be blunt, Delicious is a pretty boring site.

Having something a bit more graphically pleasing to the eye can help a bit when you are a frequent user.

Social

It would be hard for any application or site to operate these days without some sort of social interaction with your friends or potential friends. Zootool’s home page shows popular tags and popular pages saved.

If you are a using a site like Digg or Stumbleupon, you will see some similarities. The socialness of the site is pretty apparent.

Apple type layout

Many of the stylings are very Apple-like. Very clean, simple and there is only what is needed and nothing more. When you are in the “Zoo” you will see what I mean. It almost seems as though you are in an Apple web-app.

Bookmarklet

Using a bookmarklet can speed up the process of adding a bookmark. Drag the small bit of Java code to your bookmark bar. Later, when you are surfing the web and see a page you’d like to come back to, click the Zootool bookmarklet to save the page.

Packs

Packs are categories to better sort your bookmarks. When you are saving a site, you will have the option to add tags, whether you want the bookmark to be public as well as a pack.

Initially the drop down will only show New Pack. If you want to create new packs, the easiest way is to go to your Zoo and press the plus sign in the bottom left corner of the page.

Pictures

When you are saving a page, Zootool will pull up all of the images on the page and offer the option to save them. If you are bookmarking a search on a photo site like Flickr, this is a very useful feature.

When you save a picture, it will save a link to the full size image. If you simply save the page and not a specific picture, the image associated with the page will be a screen capture of the page.

Coming and going

Everyone knows how much it sucks to change services. Zootool lets you import up to 200 of your bookmarks. Most browsers and web-based bookmarking services offer an export option. By exporting your bookmarks to a file on your desktop, you can easily import them to your Zootool account.

Conclusion

I have to admit, I like the way it emulates the Mac application layout. It looks, feels and acts like it is a Mac desktop application. Drag and drop functionality along with a more visually appealing bookmarking site makes for a site much more exciting to use.

Image Japus (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons

Getting Started

You will, of course, want to check out http://www.google.com/reader/play/. You’ll first be brought to something of a Welcome screen.

Once you’re ready to get started, you’ll get the main Play screen. This is where everything happens, and it’s very similar in design to the Stumble Video screen that many of you may be familiar with.

Items are organized into a playlist of sorts, and you can scroll them like a slideshow. The bottom panel displays a scrolling list of content that may be text, images, or other multimedia. Images are automatically scaled to the appropriate size, and videos are embedded into the display window.

If an item has multiple related images, Play will sort them into a table and you can click the desired image to display full size.

Tools and Settings

Most of Play’s tools and options can be found in the toolbar between the main viewing area and the thumbnail scrollbar.

The first box simply hides or shows the bottom thumbnail panel. Items can still be scrolled with arrow keys or by clicking the arrows on either side of the viewing area.

The second icon with the eye symbol changes your view options. As shown above, Play will by default sort images and things into a table. This button will set the display to be more like that of the original page. This is often handy if Play is not showing things correctly.

The third option, the one with the slider icon, is a little more complex. With this you can filter your items to match certain criteria, such as things you’ve Liked in Reader. You can also choose specific categories for Play to display.

The fourth option, with the television icon, enables or disables the slide show mode. This seems of somewhat limited use, because it seems unlikely that any one time setting would be appropriate for all, or even most of the items shown.

The final three items are to Star, Like, and Share. As in GMail, starring an item has no particular function other than that the item is now marked, and can be pulled up later in a list of starred items. Liking an item, as in StumbleUpon, can influence the future items that Play will recommend for you. Shared items are sent to your Reader shares, and optionally Buzz.

Have fun Playing!

In your iPhone, open the safari app.

On the address bar, enter www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar

That’s it. The StumbleUpon toolbar will appear and it immediately stumbles you to one of its pages.

To stumble through websites, simply tap on the Stumble button, like how you always did on your computer browser.

Adding to bookmarks

To save the effort of having to retype the URL everytime, you can save the SU toolbar in your bookmark.

Everytime when you access the StumbleUpon toolbar, it will start stumbling and append the destination URL to its own, resulting in an URL like http://www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar/#2LpQMi/maketecheasier.com/8-useful-and-interesting-bash-prompts/2009/09/04/topic:Linux%2FUnix.

I am sure you won’t want to save this long URL in your bookmark, unless you want to save this particular page for future reference.

Here’s how you can change it.

On any StumbleUpon page, click the + at the bottom screen to save the current URL to Bookmark.

Change the title to StumbleUpon (or any name you like). Note that you won’t be able to change the URL here.

Save to Bookmark.

Back in the Bookmark screen, tap on the Edit (at the bottom left corner) button.

Press the StumbleUpon bookmark entry to go into Edit mode.

Change the URL to www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar. Save.

That’s it. Everytime you launch this bookmark, it will start stumbling.

Personally, I  found that using StumbleUpon on my iPhone drained my battery much faster than normal browsing. I am not sure if it is only me, or this is a SU issue. If you have such issues too, feel free to voice it out in the comments.