Here are a few of my favorite things... Toolbar Favorites. I'm not going to lie. I am a total nerd about Favorites, especially adding Favorite shortcuts to the carousel on the Toolbar. Deciding which URLs are worthy of one of the few highly coveted spots on the Toolbar Carousel as well as which icon goes with what shortcut is something that I spend way too long on (like making a WeeMee ... I can kill an entire afternoon perfecting a WeeMee). So Toolbar Favorites was one of the first features I checked out two weeks ago when I downloaded Desktop 10.1.

There are parts of the new Toolbar Favorites functionality that I really like and some that I wish were better. I love the "More" option. It used to be a huge dilemma for me when I realized I had a new site that I needed to regularly check but my carousel was full and I had to delegate one of my beloved existing Toolbar Favorite shortcuts down to the lame Favorite Places folder (where there was no icon, it took an extra click to retrieve, there was no ability to sort ...). I also like that all the AOL channels were represented upon initial download. In 9.1, the selection of default AOL shortcuts seemed random.

But I've worked here almost ten years and I know how to get around AOL pretty well so I wanted to move the AOL channels out of the visible Toolbar Carousel (which is why the "More" feature is so fabulous – I don't have to delete them altogether). Changing out the Toolbar Favorites was a piece of cake – I love drag and drop functionality. I had hopes maybe there would be some new icons from the library added for the shortcuts, but there was nothing new. However, what is new is that now, when you add a Toolbar Favorite, the shortcut icon is often picked up from the page. For example, I regularly read a friend's blog that uses Vox. When I added the URL to my Toolbar Favorites, the default icon showed up as the Vox logo. That was pretty neat.

Sadly, because the new Toolbar is a lot narrower, the icons are very small once they are implemented. If it hasn't already been made clear that I really enjoy using Toolbar Favorites, let me reiterate the point by saying I rely on them constantly. I am used to being able to glance across the Toolbar and seeing a clear "!" and knowing that's the shortcut for my Poll Tool or knowing the cartoon penguin will take me to my family's Web site. They are not as recognizable anymore. However, when you mouse over them, you now get a full description, whereas before there was a strict character limit (my Poll Tool used be identified as "Plltl").

Lastly, and this is what I am really excited about, it is easy to (FINALLY) prioritize the Favorites, both on the Toolbar Carousel and in the Favorite Places folder – again, a simple drag and drop. In 9.1, that was one of my biggest frustrations. If I wanted to change the order on the Toolbar Carousel (like group all the similar ones together), I had to delete the Toolbar Favorite and re-add it to the new location. If I wanted to organize my Favorite Places folder (like alphabetize them), well, I couldn't. I also thought it was interesting that all of my Favorite places from AOL 9.1 came over as did my Internet Explorer Favorites. It was great to have them all in the same place and conveniently accessible down the left-side of the Web panel.

Let me conclude by acknowledging I have a seriously unhealthy obsession with Toolbar Favorites. It's bad enough I probably spent a full hour playing with, organizing, prioritizing and assigning icons to my Toolbar Favorites list. Now I've also spent an entire blog just talking about them. More (on a new topic, I promise) next week!