What governs efficient browsing is the speed of finding bookmarks, specially the most used ones, and the fastest way to do that is the ability to easily spot what we need. In the case of bookmarks, a snapshot of a website would be the solution, and that’s what triggered the creation of visual bookmarking.

Visual bookmarks are not new, at least for installed applications. The concept of visual bookmarking was first introduced in Opera browser, and it’s adequately called "Speed Dial". Firefox doesn’t yet have this functionality, but if you are a fan like me, you can easily have it by installing an extension such as Speed Dial. Google, on the other hand, recognized the importance of visual bookmarks and had this feature included with the first release of Chrome. They even made it the first thing to see when you load a "New Tab". Visual bookmarks definitely improve the experience of finding the sites you are looking for, and they sure look good.

Today’s roundup is about 6 online services that let you "speed dial" websites by visually displaying your bookmarks in the form of tiled snapshots. The services are similar in essence, and they almost perform the same way; a quick sign up, start bookmarking, screenshots of your bookmarked sites start appearing, organize them in tabs or tags, access them from anywhere, and if you want to share them, the option is there. The bonus site in this roundup is a service that lets you "see the sites" bookmarked on Delicious.

Final Note

It is worth mentioning that other visual bookmarking services exist such as FFFFound, imgfave, vi.sualize.us, and We Heart It, but they are mainly specialized in bookmarking images or videos rather than entire web pages. This is an indication of how visual bookmarking is becoming the service of choice for accessing, managing, and sharing what interests us on the web; after all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

J.otDown is a simple Internet-based notepad. The service is straight forward, once you navigate to the site you are presented with an empty page where you can start typing your notes immediately. Saving happens as soon as you pause or if you click on the save link. This in turn creates a link to the created notes page, which allows you to share it with anyone.

J.otDown uses are many, a few examples include:

• "To do" lists
• Jotting down ideas or reminders
• Sharing large chunks of text quickly with others