What a week we’ve had!

It started great…

When you put a lot of time and energy into something it sure is great to see that it was not in vain. Well, last week was exactly that way for us. From May 23^rd Faviki is a featured project on Google code homepage, as a tool that uses Google AJAX search API.

Google API helps Faviki users with adding tags and searching. Sometimes it is hard to find the most appropriate tag with autocomplete list, especially in the cases of abbreviations and ambiguous terms. That is where Google search comes in handy. We’ll have more about this feature very soon.

This was a great nod to us and we were very excited and proud especially considering that we are a long time users of Google tools and services. Since then we’ve had a huge increase in visitors and Faviki started getting the attention we honestly believe it deserves.

But that was just the beginning. On May 26^th an excellent article about Faviki was posted on ReadWriteWeb. The article is a great description of what Faviki is, how it is used and what problems it solves. Among other things the article concludes:

If that turns out to be true [that tags will play an increasingly important role in the structure of the web,] then Faviki represents a big step in that direction by offering a transitional service between social bookmarking and a purely semantic-based bookmarking service that would automatically know how to tag any content saved by discovering the semantic aspects already associated with that web page.

…and then got even better!

They say that when it rains it pours, but when it’s shining… well it can be really bright! Here’s more of the “sunshine” we had during last week.

For a while Faviki was present on Del.icio.us homepage and has so far been bookmarked by 207 people. A lot of other web pages that deal with Faviki have also been bookmarked.

Also, Faviki is officially a killer! A killer startup, that is. Here is a part of what Killer startups had to say about us:

Why it might be a killer
Faviki is the next generation in social bookmarking. There are a lot of implications for semantic search and semantic tagging. It makes this a lot more efficient and easier for the user.

A Rotorblog post by Arnold Zafra entitled Faviki Offers Social Bookmarking with Semantic Tagging stated the following:

Faviki has the making of a killer application. The only problem it faces right now is how to get into the social bookmarking niche with the presence of already popular del.ici.ous, magnolia and others. But sometimes, we users tend to look for something else. So, Faviki is a good alternative, if not worthy of at least a try.

There is also a very good post Faviki uses Wikipedia and DBpedia for semantic tagging. Author’s question was:

One interesting research question is whether it’s possible to combine the ease of using user-generated tags with the power of mapping them into tags in a structured or semi-structured knowledge base.

And his conclusion is:

Deriving knowledge bases from Wikipedia and using them in innovative is a very exciting topic that is sure to receive a lot of work in the coming years.

Dennis D. McDonald’s question was How Important Are Tags to You?. He notices the following:

While controlled indexing vocabularies and classifications schemes have existed for as long as indexes, catalogs, and information retrieval systems have existed, the benefits of such controlled vocabularies have been somewhat limited to professional and specialized communities or other organizations that already have a vested interest in standard ways of referring to concepts and ideas.

Once authorship and usage extend beyond such communities – which happens very easily online – it’s possible that the advantages of standardization, specialization, and specificity of tags might start to break down as profession- and knowledge-based borders are crossed.

We are really excited that Faviki has broken the language barrier. A detailed description of Faviki in Japanese can be found at http://mojix.org/2008/05/27/faviki. Two more posts about Faviki in Japanese can be found here and here. There are also posts in Chinese and Italian.

In addition, the first printed article is published in the Italian magazine Digital life. Check out the online version. Thanks, Donatella!

We are so modern we belong to the museum

But a very special type of museum it is. Faviki is now a member of Museum of Modern Betas. Even if you are not exactly a museum type you can get your dose of cutting edge bookmarking!

Faviki is also „on display” at Emily Chang – eHub, at Betadaily, at I’m Not Actually a Geek as well as at LawyerKM.

The word about Faviki has also spread on Twitter. We found two of the tweets especially cute:

my social bookmarking prayers have been answered: http://www.faviki.com/, by thebatlab (link)

and

Playing with http://faviki.com/ … Social bookmarking with DBpedia concepts instead of tags. Cool! Can’t decide if it’s Web 2.0 or Web 3.0., by cygri (link)

Finally, we would especially like to mention the very first post about Faviki. Matt was among the first Faviki users and his support has meant so much to us.

So, as you can see, last week was really great. We extend our thanks to all of the websites and people mentioned above. Also, we send thanks and best regards to all of our users. You Favikings give us the energy and drive to continue our quest of developing Faviki. Your feedback is always welcome, as we are trying to make our website better for you (and for us, because we use it too ).