Internet Births Yet Another Beautiful Baby: imgfave.com

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I love the internet–love, love, love it–for a number of reasons; one of those reasons is websites like imgfave.com. Last weekend imgfave founder and creator Gabe Ragland was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about his innovative image bookmarking community. We’re delivering it to you in an exclusive Retrospective interview.

imgfave allows users to collect all images found online in one place—and there’s even a handy bookmarklet widget to help! Once clicked, all of a page’s collectable images are highlighted, and when selected, magically whisked through the interpipes to your very own profile page. This is totally badass in that it saves those three pesky steps of downloading images, renaming and saving them, then uploading them to be repurposed for whatever one’s nefarious internet needs may be—a function that professional bloggers will find especially useful. imgfave users can also friend and follow other users’ found pictures. Design firms (or anyone who uses a lot of images online) can create team pages, and photographers and illustrators now have one more locale to display their wares. Imgfave is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

And now, a word with Gabe Ragland, mastermind of my new favorite interweb utility:

TR: imgfave is pretty neat, where did you get the idea?

iF: The initial idea came out of the concept of microblogging. I had heard about an open source microblogging platform called laconica, which basically allowed anyone to setup a service very similar to Twitter. I was thinking about how that software and the general concept of microblogging could be applied to other forms of media. I’ve done a lot of art and photography, and have always been interested in doing a web project based around art, so I decided to modify laconica and turn it into a platform for collecting and sharing images. I really liked the idea of creating a community without language barriers. Today the imgfave community consists of users from all over the world and I think that’s been possible because the focus is entirely on the images.

TR: What is your goal for the application: get acquired, get funding, keep it as a fun web-gizmo?

iF: I’m happily employed at the moment, so my plan is to keep working on imgfave as a fun side project and not try to monetize it. I think it’s easy to lose enthusiasm for a project once you shift into the business mindset. I just really want to have fun with imgfave and keep adding cool features. If any artist, designer, developer wants to get involved in the project definitely let me know. I want to create an amazing community for artists and art lovers to share their inspiration, and the more people who want to be a part of it the better!

TR: A quick glance over the site and there are some lovely pictures posted by people with good taste. I just posted a picture of an NFL player, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. What happens when people start posting naked NFL players, or NFL players on vacation doing compromising things? I guess the question is, what’s to stop this from turning into a Flickr type of site, or is that the eventual goal?

iF: I’ve been working on a recommendation engine for the site. The eventual goal is to have the front page personalized to each users tastes and have the engine be able to identify taste groups. This is a challenge, but I think it’s definitely doable. The goal is to a maintain a high level of “quality” for everyone.

TR: What happens when perverts/spammers discover imgfave, do you have any safety mechanisms?

iF: I have a few users who help moderate and take down content that definitely shouldn’t be on the site, such as spam or porn.

Visit imgfave here.

Make pals with me on imgfave: shaaners

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