Zootool review

The official Zootool app for the iPhone is here. If you’ve never heard of Zootool, its basically a social bookmarking service that uses images to create a more pleasant gallery like format. With Zootool, images, videos, web links and documents can be tagged and bookmarked into your personal profile page. THe iPhone app lets you check out the public timeline, your own stuff (aka Zoo) and the saves by people you are following on Zootool. You can import your existing delicious or browser favorites into Zootool, and hook the service into Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more.

Social discovery is at the heart of Zootool, so the Everyone tab is placed at the top of the app. Here you can filter out popular bookmarks, or just check out the entire stream of new bookmarks coming into the Zootool system. If you find people you admire or are interested in and start following them in Zootool the app also has you covered in the Following tab. Check the People tab to find Active, Popular, New, and Featured users you may want to stalk in Zootool.

Saving a new bookmark has the following options: URL, Title, Tags, Pack, Public, and Description. Packs in your Zoo are just self created groups or folders for organizing your stuff. You can then find your bookmarks and search for things by any of the fields you want.

The app itself is gorgeously designed just as the website is. THe only issue I’ve found so far is that there is a small lag i loading the image thumbnails when browsing bookmarks, as well as when the app fires up its internal Safari browser. One final note, Zootool is a free service and provides the app free of charge. The only fee you may want to pay is a “set your own price” Pro Membership with Zootool which gives you access to a whole slew of additional features, as well as supporting the developers.