Favicon Friends

[Andy]

The subject title here is posted in the cut loose saloon so it is exposed to the world and cannot be patented or trademarked since I thought of it first and released it to the public domain here as prior art. Time stamp: 12:41 GMT Daylight time 1st April 2006

The idea is to have an area on your web site that contains favicon icons which link to web sites that you want to exchange links with. So instead of traditional text links, you have image links in the form of favicons. These are normally 16x16 pixels in size and displayed in browser tabs and stored on your website as a file called favicon.ico

For example you could have a 4x4 grid of favicons linking to 16 other sites. This grid would then fit snugly into a small area of your home page and would create curiosity in visitors to click the links. A bit like a scaled-down version of the Million Dollar home page concept I guess?

Microsoft invented the favicon so I'm sure if this idea became a commercial success, they would claim some compensation for using Favicons.

Anyway, what do you think about this idea?

[Queen Bee]

Hmm... I think this is a good idea! That way there would be less text and an easy way to access interesting looking websites... And no one has to deal with annoying button sizes or large/space wasting graphics. This would clean things up quite a bit.

[SensoVision]

it's really something new IMHO, and maybe this idea would pick up...
the only problem is size of favicon itself as it's pretty small and it could be hard for someone to understand what's it presents Of course there could be some workarounds like using ALT text and so on...
Let's see how it work. If anyone would use this idea I'd apprecaite if you post link here so we can see it in action.

[CoastPC]

Good idea, little like having a row of clickable buttons. Only potential problem is the size for old guys like me seeing them

Chris

[Andy]

Thanks for the feedback. I was planning to implement it but have too many other projects on the go at the moment, but I do plan to put it into action.

The links can be of the form:

Code:

<img alt="About site A" title="Click here to visit site A" src="favicon.ico" height="16" width="16" />

Then you can read information as your mouse hovers over the favicon.

[Andy]

The FREE code is ready to cut and paste!

Check it out here: http://urgentclick.com/favicon-friends/

You can see the example of what it looks like too. It's only a dummy though and each one would be different according to which sites you are linking to.

[SensoVision]

Hi Andy! have seen it today when follow your signature. I think that it's look ok, but personally I would use either 6x6 or 2x4 format. Too bad that we don't have good icon to participate

[Andy]

Hi Andy! have seen it today when follow your signature. I think that it's look ok, but personally I would use either 6x6 or 2x4 format. Too bad that we don't have good icon to participate Tongue

The page is encouraging people to take the code and set up their own groups of favicon friends. At the moment I haven't even used it myself yet. But I will do soon to link my sites and link partners.

Update: I have added a code generator so you can select various size combinations.

http://urgentclick.com/favicon-friends/

[SensoVision]

just looked at it, nice job!
But I wouldn't ignore 2x3 size as it could serve as a replacement for 88*31 buttons IMHO... don't you think it could work like this?

[Andy]

I changed it to have more options down to 1 row of 3 favicons.