Building Better Bookmarks

April 05, 2009 | David Raffauf

Sorry for the alliteration, that’s a lot of Bs.  I was recently inspired by an article I read over at Information Architects where they discuss changes they would like to see in how FireFox handles bookmarks.  They did some excellent and inspiring mockups that got my gears turning, and that I drew from heavily for this post.

They have some really good ideas that center around treating websites like we treat other media in applications like iTunes.  We can think of websites like albums.  They account for visually browsing all your favorite sites, organizing them in different lists and displaying some useful RSS data.

I’ve always liked the idea of visual bookmarks like the ones Opera uses (but not quite like the ones Safari uses).  But I’d never thought of combining RSS information until I read IA’s article.

The one thing that I wasn’t crazy about was either of the two ways that they used for browsing sites and articles.  I noticed that there is a mode of display in iTunes that would allow for a nice combination of browsing sites and seeing the most recent articles at the same time: the search results.  I did a mockup to show what this iTunes style visualization could like within FireFox, or any browser for that matter.

Like IA, I used lists to organize websites.  These would work exactly like playlists.  You have a master list of websites, but you can have any website appear within any list.  If you want to view all there’s a list for that. 

I also used their surf lists and history lists, because I think they all work with this single visualization.  Although I admit that their simple line item list of websites might work better for history considering you may have only viewed a single page on many websites.  I also like their idea of having an uncategorized list for new bookmarks.  When you have time you can put them in the right place.

As you can see below, each website has a section where the latest articles are displayed.  This is the equivalent of the way albums and tracks are displayed in iTunes’ search results.  The logo and the attributes below it serve as links straight to the homepage of the website.  All the articles are links that are grouped together from newest to oldest.

If you want to see older entries there are buttons for that.  These would either grab more entries from the RSS or a cache maintained in the browser.  All of the RSS content is searchable from the top right search menu. 

I find that regular bookmarks are a little cumbersome, live bookmarks are a bit stiff and visual bookmarks are cute but not all that useful.  I think combining all three allows for a quick way to get to everything I need and matches my workflow.