Perusing the NYTimes recently, I ran across an article, Tag That Image, on visual bookmarking services. From the Times: “Vi.sualize.us features more variety than the other sites: anything from T-shirt designs to artsy studio shots and illustrations are likely to pop up. Since the site began in September 2007, the community has expanded to roughly 10,000 members with a collection of nearly 300,000 images.” I joined one of the services, vi.sualize.us, reviewed in the article. According to the site:
vi.sualize.us is a social bookmarking website for visual contents — vi.sualize.us (read visualize us) allows you to remember your favorite images around the web, and share them with everyone.
Sometimes, you are looking through pictures and one of them catches your eye. You know you want to remember it and been able to look at it again in the future, but it’s not that easy: downloading to your hard disk is as useless as bookmarking the website in the usual way.This is where vi.sualize.us changes the rules. Within two clicks, you can quote the image reference in your account, and easily look at it whenever you want to, just as your new favorite picture deserves. All without thinking about what computer you stored it in: always online, always available.
Modeled after the social bookmarking site, del.icio.us, vi.sualize.us functions as a web-based bookmarking system To test vi.sualize.us, I bookmarked a few dozen photos form the Best of Blind Photographers blog, which higlights some of the better images from Flickr’s Blind Photographers group. This ws relatively easy to do. You are asked to describe and tag each image you bookmark. This makes searching and sorting the images fairly easy, as long as you are a proficient tagger. For Firefox users, the sie provides an easy-to-use right-click tool to bookmark images.
On the social side, there are some web 2.0 features, but they are not fully developed. There is a relatively new commenting feature, but appears to be little used so far. You can bookmark photos that have been bookmarked by others, but you have to go through the tedious step of describing and tagging the image yourself.
vi.sualize.us does its basic job very well, but has some work to do on its web 2.0 features. Will I use it? I have no idea. I still have not figured out where it fits in. Flickr already has a way to ‘fave’ images on its site. I am unlikely to want to fave many images from other sites. Yet, Flickr faves are not easily shared. Perhaps this social aspect is the niche that vi.sualize.us can fill.
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