People keep track of their travels through the web in different ways. Some use their pre-installed web browser to navigate through and save their favorite web pages. Other people install bookmarking add-ons to their browser. Others yet use web-based bookmarking sites.
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
