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Beauty Image Bookmarking 4U

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Mai Nadasaka on 4U beauty image bookmarking

Photo bookmarking seems to be the hot new thing, and 4U – beauty image bookmarking (4u.straightline.jp) may be just the site for regular visitors to Asian Sirens.There are a lot of photo bookmarking sites popping up. Examples are vi.sualize.us, FFFFOUND!, We heart it and typeish. Following my resolution to post weekly in 2009 I’m going to start by reviewing these sites from the asian sirens perspective. “4U – beauty image bookmarking” (4u.straightline.jp) is a Japanese site well suited to Asian Sirens, so that’s where I’m starting. It is also the only one of these photo bookmarking sites to be featured on Asian Sirens already (here).

Like other bookmarking sites, photos are tagged and presented without much annotation. To bookmark a photo you must first apply to become a power user (I did; it involves an email request), but anyone can develop a set of preferences. Each photo is marked with a button that says “I love her.”

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Clicking that button is a vote, and each photo prominently displays how many votes it has received. For example, I posted this picture of Mai Nadasaka on Dec. 29 and it has received 31 votes (“31 people fell in love”).

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If you click “Mai Nadasaka” you go to the bookmarked page (Asian Sirens, May 10, 2008). If you click “31 people fell in love” you will see a list of those 31 people, and you can click their names to see what else they love. You also see other pictures of Mai Nadasaka, pictures that are related, and a sampling of pictures bookmarked by some of the fans.

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It’s easy to spend a lot of time clicking from photo to photo.

The major drawback of 4U is that many of these “bookmarks” are to sites like flickr or tumblr (or even Google reader) where photos have been reposted with little information (or where photos are no longer found). The problem is exacerbated by the inflexible bookmarking method, which captures the URL, page title, and image but allows no editing. Thus, even if I want to provide more information to my bookmark I can’t. To be honest, there was a set of instructions in Japanese that I did not understand, so there may be ways to edit bookmarks that I don’t know about. However, it’s certainly true that most bookmarks are not to sites with more information, or even to sites with more photos of the same girl. For that you’ll want to stick with Asian Sirens. In fact, since Asian Sirens usually has an informative title (the model’s name) on the same page as photos of high quality, most of my 4U bookmarks are back to here.

Next week, I’ll review another photo bookmarking site. In the meantime, enjoy 4U.

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0 thoughts on “Beauty Image Bookmarking 4U”

  2. Here is a sample of some of my favorites from this site http://crum.pl/f4q3

    I’ve known about this site and similar ones for a while. I would say that a label of “photo bookmarking” is a bit disingenuous. I would use the label “photo stealing”. The images being shown are a far cry from being “thumbnails” and it is not usually the site’s owners that are submitting the “bookmark”. Each “bookmark” is every bit about the photo itself, and almost nothing to do with being a link to the original site and content.

    Not that I am making any moral judgments. I just disagree with the label.

    Personally, I have used 4U on several occasions as a way to find new blogs that I like, but otherwise I don’t like spending much time on sites like it. Sites such as 4u tend to lead me into long sessions of random browsing that kill too much time.

    On the one hand, they have a never-ending supply of photos, and on the other hand, there is no easy way to limit yourself to simply a restricted set of only new content. I prefer subscribing to a few blogs that I can trust to deliver good content and that I can check on from time to time as a quick mental break. That way I know that there is only going to be a limited amount of new content in any given day to distract me, and that I am not likely to get sucked into a time warp of random browsing.

  3. Thanks Travis (and apologies, Robin). Although I really was on vacation then I should have done a search first. I did modify the text to include a link.

    I tend to agree with you DrNo. Some of the other sites are much much better (I didn’t even mention the lack of text search), but I started with 4U because it is the only one devoted to asian women.

    By the way, regarding site search, I often use the Google hack of including a site tag, like site:4u.straightline.jp or site:asian-sirens.com, so search is possible that way.

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