Fellow science communicator Jo Brodie is trying to find a neat way to replicate the thumbnail view that one gets on opening Firefox, MSIE, Safari or Chrome browsers, so that favorite or custom thumbnails of useful sites can be displayed on a single page, that might be saved and uploaded to a website or shared with other users (that’s not possible, as far as I know with the browser views). Something like this, but more social:

There seem to be a lot of sites around, social bookmarking sites, that almost do what Jo is after. She explains her requirements in more detail on her “Stuff That Occurs to Me” blog. Anyway, a quick Google reminded me of various possibilities:

http://internetbuttons.org

http://www.thumbshots.com/

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=75f22f2c2a4fe140e7cfb96922781412

http://www.thumbalizr.com

http://www.websnapr.com/

http://www.webshotspro.com/

http://myfav.es/

I don’t think any quite fits the bill, but these thumbnail generators and simple start page systems are all interesting in their own right. Meanwhile, Phil Bradley (no relation), suggested netvibes as the first port of call. It requires addition of a widget to one’s page but neatly displays thumbnails of sites you bookmark once you’ve installed it. I’m not sure it exactly fits the bill, but it might be close. There is also the “tab bundles” for Google Chrome alternative that might do the job…its bundles together all the open tabs from a Chrome browser session and creates (using http://bit.ly) a single URL that can be shared, which includes previews of the web pages that were bundled.

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• Desktop, Create Custom New Tab Page In Firefox (ghacks.net)