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Phonefavs is a social bookmarking system that allows BlackBerry owners to store, organize and share bookmarks. These bookmarks are available through your mobile browser for handy reference while on the go. PhoneFavs is the first system for social bookmarking that is developed and optimized specifically for mobile use. The service is free and requires only a couple of minutes to set up an account before you are sharing your treasured bookmarks with the rest of the online community.

The PhoneFavs homepage is a true gateway to mobile content. You have three options while you are looking at the PhoneFavs homepage: “Favs” (online bookmarks list), a handpicked mobile link directory, and a web page mobilizer that will convert standard websites and optimize them for mobile viewing on smaller screen devices.

PhoneFavs can be accessed via one of two URL’s. Head over to http://www.phonefavs.com or http://www.pfavs.com (easier to type on your BlackBerry keyboard) and sign up for your free account.

Signing up for a PhoneFavs account

In the top left corner of the PhoneFavs website you will see a link that reads “create free account”. Click on this link to get started.

You will be prompted to enter a username and an email address as well as filling out a Captcha box to ensure that you are not a robot. Fill out the information as requested and then click the “Register” button.

The final step to creating your new PhoneFavs account is clicking on the registration verification link. Once you have clicked the link, you will be given an auto generated password. You can change this password at a later date, but make sure and write it down before you leave the page.

At the bottom of the page you will see a link that reads “Proceed to your bookmarks”. Click it and get cracking! Initially you will have no bookmarks available to you so you will need to go in and set some up.

Adding Bookmarks to your PhoneFavs profile

Before diving in, you may want to read the PhoneFavs Guide which breaks down the whole process in three simple steps.

After reading the guide you will see that adding the PhoneFavs browser bookmark buttons is the easiest way to populate your mobile bookmarks list. To do this you must be using the FireFox browser.

Once you are on the PhoneFavs browser buttons page, just drag one of the available buttons into your browser toolbar. You have two options as far as buttons are concerned:

• Add Fav Form: The Add Fav Form button will actually take you away from the page you are bookmarking and display a form with various descriptive fields associated with the page you are bookmarking. Once the fields are filled out and you have saved the form, this page will be visible in your PhoneFavs bookmark list.
  
  
• Add fav Quick Pop-Over: This one is a little different than the above button. Instead of taking you away from the page that you are bookmarking, a small browser window will pop up on top of the page and present you with all the required fields to fill out.

Any time you are surfing the web and find a page you think you may want to access later, just click the PhoneFavs button on your toolbar and the site will be added to your list. You will notice that some of the fields (address, title) are already filled out for you when the form pops up.

All you need to do is add a brief description of the page and any tags that you may want to associate with it.

The last option is a small drop down menu that allows you to set the bookmark to private, public, and shared with watchlist. A watchlist is a group of PhoneFav users you are “watching”.

If you already have a list of bookmarks in IE, Firefox, Safari, Netscape or Del.icio.us, you can import these into your PhoneFavs with one click. Look at the bottom of the “add fav” page for the links that allow you to do this.

Navigating the PhoneFavs website

Whether you are viewing the PhoneFavs website via your BlackBerry or desktop, the experience is the same. You are presented with all the same links and options on both platforms. These options include:

• My Favs: Clicking on this link will take you to a list of your saved bookmarks. At any point in time you can call up this page to search through any links you have saved to your PhoneFavs account. The search function also allows for search within the directory and your watchlist. On the “My Favs” page you have the option to sort your bookmarks by date, title or URL.
  
  
• All Favs: This link will take you to a section which is very similar to the “My Favs” page, but features bookmarks which are saved by the entire community of PhoneFavs users.
  
  
• Directory: The directory is a hand selected mobile link directory that contains various categorized web pages. At the time of writing the directory contains 469 links in 15 categories.
  
  
• Mobilizer (Make it Mobile): Using this field, you can enter any website you know of and the PhoneFavs Mobilizer will do its best to convert it into a format which is accessible to your BlackBerry. I tried it out with a few sites that I knew were not mobile friendly and they were delivered with satisfying results. The Mobilizer can not turn everything it touches into gold, however it did a pretty good job parsing some very bad code.
  
  
• Multi-Search: The multi search link provides direct access to some of the webs more popular mobile search destinations. Included in the list are: Google, Weather, Wikipedia, Movies, Answers, Flickr, and eBay.
  
  
• My Tags: Clicking on the My Tags link will take you to a page which features all of the tags you have ever applied to your mobile bookmarks. You can arrange these tags in alphabetical order or have them displayed according to popularity (frequency of use).

In addition to all of the above functionality, the PhoneFavs team have also put together a great FAQ document and some handy Tips to help new users get started and existing users get the most out of their PhoneFavs account.

My Opinion

All in all, the PhoneFavs application is a great little addition to your web based bookmarking portfolio.

While PhoneFavs does not bring anything new to the table as far as “Social Bookmarking” is concerned, the inclusion of the handy “Mobilizer” is a definite plus in my books.

There are plenty of websites that I shy away from while browsing online with my BlackBerry because they are not particularly suited to the mobile experience. Using the Mobilizer functionality at PhoneFavs.com has made the process of browsing non-mobile websites a little less painful.

The price is right on this one guys, free is free. If an application is free and has the ability to simplify even one aspect of your life (in this case mobile browsing and bookmarking) then I consider that a win win. Give PhoneFavs a shot and start saving your URLs online for easy access via your BlackBerry.

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