A lot of the time I’m pretty critical of Google, and while I may not agree with everything they do, or every agenda they push, there is no denying that have made the web a better place, and have provided us with some really helpful tools. One of the areas that they have missed the mark on is bookmarks, off the top of my head I can recall having tried four or five different attempts that had some interesting twists but always fell short IMHO. So in this post I’m going to give the folks at Mountain View some ideas on how they can build a better bookmarking tool, and crush everyone else.
Delicious: Delicious is currently my favorite bookmarking tool of choice, I don’t use it for things I visit everyday but I do use it for interesting articles that I think I might want to use or read in the future. I can access from anywhere and even save to it using my mobile phone. However I can’t reach it if I don’t have web access, I can’t type in something I think was on the page, and if the page goes offline it’s gone.
Magnolia: Magnolia seemed like they had the problem solved all of your bookmarks were in the cloud and they had backups of all the pages, so no worries if a page died. Except of course magonolia died, and all of the data did get lost, bummer.
Foxmarks/Xmarks: Foxmarks recently renamed itself Xmarks (umm okay) what it does is sync up all of your local bookmarks and passwords to the cloud, so you can keep multiple computers in sync, or access your bookmarks from everywhere. You have access to all your bookmarks online or offline, but large set of bookmarks become unwieldy, so it works best for stuff you need to visit/use often not long term storage.
What a bookmarking tool needs to do is solve a few problems:
- Store all of the sites/links I visit/use regularly
- Store in a separate “bucket” the sites I want to keep as a reference for the future
- Tags, send to a friend, share
- Keep a cache/archive of the sites in case they go offline
- Have the ability to search the pages I have bookmarked for text I put in
- Sync or backup more than one computer to the cloud
- Store MULTIPLE (double bold double underline) passwords per website and sync/backup to the cloud
Google has a lot of this technology already in place it’s just not tied together. You can bookmark stuff but it’s only in the cloud not your local machine (you know people write offline and can insert links). You can share stuff but it’s clunky unless you use google reader. They have a cache of most pages but it’s not tied to bookmarks. One of the bookmarking tools actually does search the page contents but it’s not a well known feature. There is no sync between cloud and browser it’s either or. Chrome lets you only have one password per site, and doesnt sync to cloud.
If I were running a search engine and looking for ways to gather user data that had a high signal to noise ratio something like that would be pretty darn useful. If I had a new brrowser that I wnated people to switch to giving them features like this would be amazingly powerful. If I was looking to convert the delicious power users, giving them a permenant cache and in page searching would be pretty attractive, especially if there was a migration tool.
Google you have all the pieces to make a better bookmarking tool you just have to find the resources to bring it all together, from where I see it a tool like that could be pretty powerful.
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{ 5 comments }
This is interesting Michael, because I’m really at a crossroads with what to do to store my links. At the moment I have my own tool that I built locally with a javascript widget that allows me to quickly add links and important passages (thank you ctrl-hilight) to the system, tag etc, but the caching is a real issue. Tapping into Google’s cache via their API may be an interesting answer.
Anyways, the fact that I had to roll my own (can I say RMO?) outlines that I feel the need and you are correct, Google has all of the pieces. What I would not be interested in is browser lock-in though…
Just to add to your wish list, could Google app engine not provide an offline ‘backup’ of this dream system? This would be nice for viewing stored links when internet is not around and also for avoiding data loss of magnolia proportions…
Something that’s really key for me — and I seem to be in the vast minority here — is the keyword field. In firefox, you can assign a keyword to a bookmark, giving you a short string you can type in the browser’s location bar that will load the corresponding bookmark. It’s a huge timesaver.
For example, [ALT+D] [w] [enter] loads up weather.com pointing to my zipcode, since I’ve got it bookmarked with a keyword of w.
A lot of tools miss out on this.
Surprisingly, Chrome doesn’t, if you import bookmarks from Firefox. It doesn’t display the keyword field anywhere, so you can’t edit it, but it will actually preserve it and let you use it.
Sadly, I can’t say the same for any other bookmarking system I’ve tried.
Well they they must be using their current bookmarks system to assist with ranking page popularity otherwise they are missing out on priceless data. As for making a tool to better manage individual bookmarks, they may be moving all SERPs in this direction, but there is still a lot of work to do.
I think the use of foxmarks and del.icio.us may be the best solution at the moment, but the nofollows in del.icio.us suck. their whole site is build off of content from other sites but they slap nofollows on the links, like the source is not credible, cause Google has made everyone afraid. if the source aint credible then dont link to it at all, or pull content from it… sorry for ranting
good post
that’s great i don’t know what are u doing but i hope so u are are doing well work
keep it up…..u store my link ……….
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