Zootool

» see zootool.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

my bookmarks were always text. a link was a line, blue and underlined, and a pile of them was a list i scrolled. Zootool wanted the opposite of that. it wanted your saved web to be a picture, a grid of thumbnails you could look at the way you look at a shelf, and honestly that was a want i did not really have. i was not in the crowd that collected images for a living or for the pleasure of arranging them.

it started in 2008 as a design student's project in Mannheim, in Germany, made by Bastian Allgeier. the idea was a visual Delicious. you clipped a page or an image with a browser button and Zootool pulled a thumbnail and filed it into your collection, so your bookmarks arrived as a wall of little pictures instead of a column of titles. designers loved it for exactly that reason. it was the kind of tool you kept a mood board in before the phrase mood board was everywhere.

Allgeier is a name a certain kind of developer knows now, but not for this. a few years after Zootool he made Kirby, a small flat-file CMS that a good slice of the independent web still runs on. Zootool was the earlier thing, the one he built young and then could not keep feeding once the interesting work moved elsewhere. that happens to a lotta one-person services. the person is the whole company, and the person only has so many hours.

~ the case file ~

~ the crowd it was for ~

the thing Zootool understood, that plain bookmarking never did, was that some people think in images. a designer keeps a hoard of references, screenshots and layouts they liked, and a list of URLs is a terrible way to hold that. Zootool turned the whole thing into something you could take in at a glance. for a few years it had a real cult, small and loyal, the sort of following that keeps a niche tool alive well past the point where the money makes any sense.

~ the quiet ending ~

there was no shutdown post and no goodbye. sometime in 2013 the sign-up form stopped working, and Allgeier said, when people asked, that he had been ignoring the support mail for a while. the site limped on into 2014 and then the app itself just stopped answering, and where the grid of thumbnails had been there was only a small static page. a solo service does not really die so much as get quietly abandoned, and from the outside those two things look exactly the same. one day the pictures were there. then they were a 404 with a nice font.

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