Description: Favthumbs is a web service that can show del.icio.us bookmarks from any public account as thumbnails or iTunes-style carousel display.

If you use del.icio.us or if you like to browse other people’s public bookmarks on del.icio.us, Favthumbs can make browsing these a much more enjoyable experience. What it does is scan and capture del.icio.us bookmarks collections as thumbnails, and then makes these available in a stylish, sleek looking interface.

This service employs the same principle as Homepage Startup in that both are designed to display pages of bookmarked sites as thumbnails which then can be used as home pages. Here are more notes on this program:

• Del.icio.us accounts: Favthumbs can display any public del.icio.us bookmarks (the URL used will be Favthumbs/name where “name” is the delicious account name. You can optionally provide your Del.icio.us password and retrieve any and all bookmarks that might not be shared publicly.
• Thumbnails: can be resized using a slider. Each thumbnail is captioned with the site name and description. Although the service was able to grab thumbnails for the majority of my bookmarks, for some it simply displayed a blank white rectangle, an “image coming soon” message, or a partially-rendered thumbnail. If you are lucky and all of your thumbnails are rendered adequately then that is great; if not and you end up with a lot of white thumbnails it can reduce the attractiveness of the whole thing considerably.
• Carousel view: this is similar to the iTunes carousel view. A good idea but was less than smoothly animated in my browser window and I must admit to personally prefer the simple thumbnail view to this.
• Tags: del.icio.us tags are displayed on the right hand side of the screen and can be used to filter the displayed thumbnails.

The verdict: such a simple, brilliant idea I am surprised that del.icio.us itself does not provide something like it. Because of this I am now seriously thinking of reviving my otherwise dormant del.icio.us account and using it as my primary bookmarking service. Recommended.

Version Tested: the site as of Aug 12, 2008

Go the Favthumbs page.