all i want for christmas is a ffffound account

ffffound logo

FFFFound (that's 4 F's) is an image bookmarking service that is currently in private beta, meaning you need to be invited, somehow, to use it. I haven't been invited yet.

I first found out about it on the wonderful notebook of Michal Migurski (Migurski's found can be found here). It has also received glowing reviews recently over at Speak Up and kottke.org. Put simply, ffffound is like del.icio.us, except specifically for images. Users can save and share their favorite images, see others' ffffinds, and get links to recommended images. And, like del.icio.us, it can lead to a broader view of what images are hot right now. And as pointed out by the kottke article above, this can lead to a new form of art curating:

In the case of FFFFOUND! and other RCOPIWSs [Randomly Curated Other People's Images White Background Site], I would argue that these sites showcase a new form of art curating. The pace is faster, you don't need a physical gallery or museum, and you don't need to worry about crossing arbitrary boundaries of style or media. Nor do you need to concern yourself with questions like "is this person an artist or an outsider artist?" If a particular piece is good or compelling or noteworthy, in it goes.

One notable deviation from the del.icio.us model is the lack of tags. I'm not sure the reasoning behind this, but some people just aren't into folksonomies.

I can definitely see the utility in this. Over the past week I would have saved dozens of images. Including this one. Often we find images that we want to remember, but bookmarking the URL seems odd, and saving the image file to hard disk isn't a very good solution. And neither of these options would include the social component that makes del.icio.us so great. Here's hoping somebody invites me to ffffound or it goes public pretty soon.