Finally, there is now a half decent chance of being able to find something again that you added on Ffffound in the past. I was only wondering the other week if there was any way to actually get at your Ffffound collection, well now you can.

For years I kept a ‘nice things’ folder on my machine, where I put anything cool I came across online. Since I started using Ffffound though, the nice things folder has become a little neglected and as soon as something is ffffound, it is almost as quickly llllost.

Check out Ddddownload, you can download your Ffffound collection (or anyone else’s for that matter). Just type the username in and give your email address and a ZIP file is emailed to you. It takes a while if you have a lot of stuff (mine took 20 minutes and weighed in at 145Mb for 1500 items) but after it arrives it unzips everything intact.

Nice, now can someone email me a link to where all my odd socks have gone?

Found this great visual trace tool on Uneasysilence. It lets you see how the data which makes up your website actually gets to the viewer, through various servers and gateways. It uses Google Maps to show you, so you can zoom around and look at it as a map or a satellite image as usual.

The image here shows the route for holster.co.uk

I thought I’d post about Ffffound!, a great site which I actually stumbled across a while ago but have really got into recently. It’s basically del.icio.us or Flickr but for graphics, and it’s super simple and easy to use.

The site allows users to grab any image on the web (you can’t get at Flash content or stuff hidden inside framesets mind you) and clip it to their Ffffound! profile to browse later. It’s genius the way it’s done, you simple add a bookmarklet to your browser bar and press it when you’re on the page you want to save an image from. Magically all the images get a thick border and you simply click the one you want.

That’s it, no tagging, no posting, no logging in, it’s that easy. And I think that’s the key, because clipping things like this only becomes second nature, useful and enjoyable if it’s easy to do, with as few extra steps as necessary. I wrote a while ago about Boxedup, which is great, but adding a product to that site does require a bit of tinkering which sometimes is enough to make me think twice abut bothering at all, especially if I don’t have much time.

Ffffound doesn’t use tags (which seems to be a deliberate choice rather than an omission) but it can still track trends and suggests images for you based on your own preference, it also shows you when other users like similar things. There’s even a screensaver which displays either the site’s, or your own picks while your machine is idle…

The only things I guess I would like to see developed would be some way to actually find something specific on the site, as once a favourite of yours is a little older, it simply drifts somewhere within a long list. There’s no way of finding that lovely piece of type you remember saving a couple of months ago. I’d also like to be able to recommend images to other people when I find something I know they’d like or find useful. Other than that, unusually I’m going to resist suggesting bells and whistles, I think that’s part of the site’s charm.

The site is still quite small and it’s a private beta at the moment, only members can invite new ones. This is the reason I had passed it by up to now, but after being reminded about it on Ben Terrett’s blog I emailed the guys who run it and blagged my way in. It looks like a Japanese site (some practise for my Japanese reading skills) and may have something to do with Yugo Nakamura of yugop fame…

Thanks to Keita for inviting me in!