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.”

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”).

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.

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.