For quite a while now Symbaloo has been a popular visual bookmarking tool. Yesterday, I visited with Symbaloo’s CEO and one of their developers here at the BETT Show. Later this year they will be adding some new features that will help teachers see the resources that their students use the most. I cannot tell you more about those features, yet. The other outcome of my meeting was learning that Symbaloo is a completely self-funded and profitable enterprise. What that means to you and me is that the company isn’t influenced by venture capital funding and that its current business model is successful. So if you like Symbaloo’s free service now, you can plan on it continuing to be free moving forward.

Symbaloo is an excellent service on which you can visually organize your favorite and most frequently used websites. Symbaloo allows you to bookmark your favorite websites and arrange them into tile boards that you can share or keep private. Symbaloo calls the tile boards webmixes. You can create multiple webmixes arranged according to topics of your choosing. Symbaloo offers a free iPhone app, a free Android app, and free Windows mobile app that you can use to add to and access your webmixes anywhere.

Applications for Education
Symbaloo does offer an education version, but the education version is not free except for individual use which doesn’t make it different than signing up for a regular Symbaloo account. Symbaloo can be good for organizing a set of resources to share with your students or colleagues. You could also have students create their own Symbaloo accounts and create webmixes around topics that they are researching.