I ran across Vi.sualize.us a while ago in beta but never took the time to get involved in what the tool had to offer. I found a need for it today and went back to exploring what services it could offer me. You integrate Vi.sialize.us into Firefox as an extension, or a bookmark button for other browsers. You can also paste in an image link if you want to go the very manual route. Once that portion is done, you are ready to use the service.
The idea is to bookmark and share favorite pictures you find across the web, not just blog postings and web pages as usual. Usually the images themselves are the important part of the page.
Some bookmarking services off the ability to snip part of the webpage, or you could always right click and open just the image. But that leaves a nasty URL behind and limited context for the image. Vi.sualize.us adds tagging, liking, comments and sharing to the pictures you find.
They have navigation for your images, most recent and the most popular on the site. They offer tags to watch and the most used overall. RSS feeds exist for public, personal and individual picture images. So enough of the UI description, how about the experience.
Sharing an image on the site was limited, no Twitter integration, but did have Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and email. You can like any image on the site and keep it private or share it to your stream. The original source of the picture is always accredited right below te picture with a link to the posting it was found. This is great for the creator or owner of the images and source verification for copyright. I also noticed that they built in a filter, with the default of on for safe images. I presume unsafe means NSFW.
The images on the site itself ran the entire spectrum from signs to abstract. I found the most benefit in tagging and grabbing images for use in future postings, links or other production as the copyright or Creative Commons rights would allow. I can now quickly save and tag images instead of goofy bookmarks and searches, shrinking down my time to find and share.
I will run it for a while and see how often I go back. That becomes the thermometer for any new tool. If I fold it into my daily workflow, I will add the image feed to m normal social streams.
use may of them, including their bookmarklets. Some closed, some got bought out, some changed business models, some sites just vanished, a few changed into freemium and didn’t offer what I need to make me pay and others just sucked and never grew into my daily routine.
