Wists is a visual bookmarking system for the web, doing for images what del.icio.us does for web pages. It’s like browsing the web with a camera, or creating your own hand-selected Google image search. Find an image you want to keep track of and Wists will create a thumbnail for you, linking back to the original site. If it’s a whole page you want to capture, Wists will take an automatic screenshot of the entire page. Add a title, tags and description and it goes into the system – a photo album of the web. Much like del.icio.us, Wists arranges popular tags on the sidebar and allows you to browse the latest entries. It also enables you to add other users’ bookmarks to your own gallery, clearing the slate for your own tags and descriptions. Best of all, it keeps track of people you’ve taken items from, and people who have taken items from you. Trails become apparent and the archive becomes interconnected. Here’s a grab of my “jaws” tag page – combing around for images, I found an amusing juxtaposition.
These are the kind of basic curatorial tools that would be great on Flickr. Currently, you are only able to apply tags to your own photos, or the those of friends, family or mutual contacts. But part of the fun of Flickr is browsing the photos of total strangers. You can comment on any photo or mark it as a favorite, but there is no way to curate your own collection of images from the community at large. Wists suggests how the gap between del.icio.us and Flickr might be bridged.