Geek out

"I used to be an architect. I think of things visually. I wanted to store links with visual cues," David Galbraith says. So he created Wists, an online visual bookmarking tool that stores thumbnail photos along with links. Think of it as del.icio.us with pictures.

Wists (www.wists.com) is handy as hell and simple to use. Create an account, and add a bookmarklet to your toolbar. As you surf and find links and images you want to bookmark, click the bookmarklet. Wists will strip the page, leaving just the images. Pick the image you want to save, add some tags and viola. Now your Wists page has a thumbnail of that image, whatever description you wrote and the link.

"In the old days, you could clip things out of a catalog," Galbraith says. "Wists is a way to share those clips with everyone." Crib Candy (www.cribcandy.com) is Galbraith's Wists-powered site of home decor and design items. Wists users add images of furniture, lamps, linens and other housewares to their Wists with the tag "cribcandy." Galbraith uses the cribcandy tag to find items for the site.

Wists is a useful way organize your holiday shopping. A visual array of gift possibilities—say, pictures of five different sweaters for your sister—makes picking and choosing a little easier, and having those options organized with both a picture and a link means you can find that darn turtleneck again really easily.

Wists is still in beta, and Galbraith says he adds user-requested features all the time. Now's your chance to influence our new favorite online tool.—Margaret Lyons