We are visual creatures, we tend to identify things better when images are associated with them. That is why favicons are so popular in tabs, it is a quick way to identify and associate a site with an image. So why don’t we do this with bookmarks? Well, many of us have A LOT of bookmarks. It is simply to cumbersome to scan through tons of web pages in image form. Still, some services attempt to solve the issue and Transferr is no exception.
Transferr is a visual bookmarking service that allows you to add sites as icons on your own dedicated page. You can import bookmarks two ways: by clicking the add an icon button at the end of your bookmarks or once logged in going to the footer of your Transferr homepage and clicking Upload Bookmarks. If you there a lot of sites you want to add your best option would be to use the Upload Bookmarks tool; but be forewarned, the process is very slow due to server load.
Once adding your sites Trekker will automatically get a screenshot of the page you have bookmarked. If the bookmark you have imported happens to be a document or another file format, Transferr will automatically place a custom icon for the image. Based off of Transferrs earlier blog posts they claim that this feature is available for hundreds of file formats. These features are quite basic and are not the highlighting options that Transferr has to offer.
Transferr lets you share your bookmarks with your friends by clicking the options buttons. All you have to is type in an email address and send them invite to view your bookmarks. Transferr also lets you change the default blue color surrounding the screenshot of your bookmark. You can also seperate bookmarks into different tabs to create categories of visual bookmarks.
There are also some options available for website owners to leverage Trekker also. Clicking on the developers link will bring you to a set of buttons in varying sizes that will allow visitors to automatically add your site to there Transferr page (assuming they have one). While it is neat Transferr allows website owners to do this, it would be nice to see some API’s to leverage the Transferr userbase and screenshot grabbing technology. As for the end user you can add a bookmarklet to your browser to add a screenshot to your Transferr page at anytime.
One of the biggest issues I have with Transferr is the amazing amount of time it takes to grab screenshots for my web pages. I waited nearly two hours for Transferr to grab a screenshot of Myspace. This problem is seemingly reoccurring though and has been documented in the Transferr blog a few times.
While Transferr is a neat twist on visual bookmarking, it doesn’t make me want to use Transferr over my default bookmarks in Chrome or Delicious. The simple reason being is I have to many bookmarks and even with the organization features I can’t see many people taking the time to do such a thing. Plus, we are in a time where web applications need to start monetizing and the current implementation of Transferr has no business model in place as far as I can tell.
What matters most though is your thoughts on Transferr, do you think Transferr will make it or is it just another dead weight in the sea of bookmarking services?
