Created with programmers, system administrators, and web designers in mind, tlbox takes the very simple idea of saving bookmarks online. Now before you dismiss it as another one of those bookmarking websites like del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia, within minutes of using it you’ll find out it’s different enough.
How tlbox Works
tlbox integrates with Firefox (compatible up to Firefox 3). Once the add-on is installed, it appears as a dropdown menu much like your typical Bookmarks folder, except that it has a fixed set of iconized subfolders, ranging from “.net” to “xml”—basically categories that are relevant to computer geeks.
I thought this was a really great idea because previously, I was trying to organize all the web design resources I might find useful later on. I use del.icio.us for my online bookmarks, but even if I kept them neatly arranged with the help of tags, it’s became cumbersome to come back later and look them up. For example, if I wanted to look at my CSS-related bookmarks, I had to type in del.icio.us/sofimi/css into my browser.
But I wanted to do that within my browser window quickly. I tried it out with a local bookmarks folder, but I couldn’t share them with anyone else, or take them anywhere else for that matter (discounting syncing services like Google Browser Sync).
On the web, you can check out what other users are bookmarking, arranged by popularity and recency, and add them to your own “box”.
It’s also interesting to note the use of icons corresponding to each available category. This helps improve the user experience especially since bookmarking sites are almost always filled with text.
Improvements
I personally believe tlbox is a lifesaver. Unfortunately, it’s a very niche service, which means any chance of feature improvements will be slim to none, but I thought talking about it might draw in more geeks, more fans, and perhaps even potential investors! Seriously, I really wish the web gurus would take a hard look at it and see where it could improve.
The only thing that bothers me about tlbox is that when I save a site, the title of the page is truncated to 32 characters.
Rigidity vs. Flexibility
Even if its current capabilities are limited to computer-related bookmarks, it’s definitely easy to accommodate other categories. tlbox just needs to be a little more flexible. Just a little. I quickly got sold on this service exactly because it was not infinitely flexible like the tag-based bookmarking ones. I needed rigid categories in order to keep my links organized and easily discover related ones. And I believe other people might feel the same way.
The Web would be much more chaotic than it already is without standards. Today we’re going to talk about how various content on the web is being represented by standardized icons. Several groups of people have come together and agreed upon these simple yet distinct icons for identifying syndicated, OPML, geotagged, shareable content.
It’s interesting to note how these standardized icons emerged. The OPML, geotag, and open share icons all base their design on the feed icon. They each consist of a white symbol on a square box with rounded corners. The boxes have a subtle diagonal gradient and an inner border which gives a slightly beveled effect.
Feed Icon
The feed icon was introduced to us by Mozilla and is used for syndicated feeds in either RSS or Atom. You can instantly infer that it stands for a signal being beamed to the rest of the world. This icon is so popular that it has been transformed in so many ways to match websites and tastes. (It’s even been turned into a real-life pillow!) But now matter how many bells and whistles designers add onto it, the icon is a much more comforting sight than other buttons and chicklets labeled XML, RSS, Atom, My Yahoo!, Bloglines, or whatnot. Icons say so much more than words than obscure acronyms—which ordinary Internet users don’t even understand. They don’t need to!
Visit the feed icon page.
OPML Icon
Related to feeds is OPML, which is an XML format for outlines. Its popular use right now is listing a group of feeds. Think feed reader reading lists and blogrolls. They can easily be shared with the OPML document format. Compared to the feed icon, the OPML icons is not as meaningful, but it’s still catchy especially since it looks like an “O”.
Visit the OPML icon page.
Geotag Icon
Geotagging is basically adding geographical information to certain content, such as photos, through a link. The geotag icon is a pushpin on a globe, which stands for pointing out a certain location in the world. It’s a really good symbol (though if you read Jeremy Keith’s tweet you might think differently from now on). It’s just that the globe looks too small for the pushpin.
Visit the Geotag icon page.
Open Share Icon
You might have heard about the Share Icon, which came from Alex King’s excellent plugin, ShareThis. We’ve talked about the service here on Wisdump not too long ago, but there’s been a controversy surrounding the use of the share icon itself. Thus, the Open Share Icon Project was formed to address such limitations.
The open share icon shows a hand passing an object to another hand. It also looks like an eye. This is much more descriptive than the share icon, which is a node branching out into two like a binary tree, if you’re familiar with Computer Science, and feels too tech-y for the mainstream crowd. A star could have been an easy choice for an icon, since it’s used in both Internet Explorer and Flock to denote “favorites” or bookmarks, but the act of sharing isn’t conveyed with it.
Visit the Open Share Icon page.
More Standard Icons?
Are there any more standard icons out there? The Microformats project has put together several icons that can be used for such. Semantic Web, anyone?
What sort of actions and content on the web actually need icons like these? File uploads and downloads? Email addresses? Tags? Asking these questions makes me want to discover what the next generation of web technologies will give us. It could be something we haven’t even imagined before.
Steal These Icons
If these icons aren’t used, they’re all for naught. We all want some consistency on the web, especially it’s made of tons of information constantly being created each second. Especially when the technologies that provide this information are still very new. Using these icons means turning data into more meaningful and properly labeled content we can all identify and understand more easily.
