no more bookmarks
So I’ve been trained since day one of using a Web browser to bookmark stuff I find that I like.
Lately I’ve been realizing how low the utility is of having a single set of bookmarks tied to a local machine. Some of the people I work with don’t even bother with bookmarking anymore. They rely instead on a combination of auto-complete of previously browsed URLs and Google to get back to stuff that was interesting.
There’s a big discussion going on right now at the Mozilla project on how to make bookmarks better in Firefox 2.
Today I finally got around, post Firefox 1.5 launch, to doing something I’ve been meaning to do for at least the past month or so: migrating my local bookmarks to del.icio.us. It took about an hour, but man, do I feel better. Like I lost about 10 pounds.
As I looked back at the stuff I’ve bookmarked over the past two months, it was chunked into the following content areas that were top of mind for me at the end of 2005:
- Firefox-specific
- Web industry
- General business/management
- Marketing and branding
- Design
- Writing
- Music
I’m sure there’s a way to add more structure to my new del.icio.us bookmarks so the stuff I tag can get browsed more easily.
Given the fact that it took me a year to figure out what the hell del.icio.us was good for, the release of a del.icio.us extension for Firefox 1.5 to actually create an account, and a rainy Saturday to make the migration happen, it may be 2012 before I figure this out.
Whatevs. Now I can get at my links from anywhere, which makes me very happy.
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Yeah, del.icio.us can group bookmarks into “bundles” by applying a meta-tag to sub-tags. So any bookmarks tagged “firefox”, “sexy” and “vulpes vulpes” can be bundled with the meta-tag “mozilla”. It’s nice, because this way your Cancun bookmark can show up under My Vacation Ideas as well as under Exotic Places (many to many relationship). In your main bookmark page, see Options > Arrange in the right-side sidebar.
I played with Del.icio.us, but instead use Pluck, a Firefox RSS/Bookmark aggregator which syncs your RSS/Bookmark feeds with their server so you always have the same from any computer. My main complaint with Del.icio.us is that I can’t figure out how to mark a bookmark as “private”. Don’t get titillated - it’s nothing that would prevent me from running for political office. It’s just that sometimes I don’t want all my bookmarks public. If you figure this out, let me know.
Cool, thanks for the tip Dave. Nice pull on the “vulpes vulpes” reference, by the way. I didn’t see a way to make my del.icio.us bookmarks private, which makes sense. The service is fundamentally about sharing links, not hoarding them. I’ll take a look at Pluck too.
I’m going through the exact same thing. I signed up a year ago and bookmarked exactly one page and promptly forgot about it. With the Yahoo! deal, it’s been on my mind again. I returned to the site and noticed the Firefox extension. Now I have 120 bookmarks in the system. I too would like some sort of private flag, but it’s not a huge deal.
The one thing that would let me completely switch away from my local Firefox bookmarks is having a way to show my bundles as folders on my bookmark toolbar. I found RSS feeds for either my tags or my bookmarks, but neither of those do what I need. For one, RSS doesn’t allow me to build a tree structure. I believe you’re allowed to build trees out of bundles (by placing them in other bundles), but I need a way to see that right in my browser without visiting the site.
This is probably possible with an extension, but I’m not sure how. I’d really like to see some sort of Bookmarks API that both del.icio.us/Yahoo! would support, as would Google, Microsoft, and everyone else. The API should allow for nested folders/bundles, tags, and searching at a minimum. A private flag would be nice. Some sort of location specific marker (maybe @home or @work tags?) would be great so that sites marked with those tags would only show up at those locations. Bookmarking RSS feeds could do the same thing they that do in Firefox and IE7.
Adding comments and some sort of thumbs up/down would also be cool, and you could even flag some sites as scams or phishing with a trusted network like with the Outfoxed extension.
Instead of having a hodgepodge of sites and extensions for managing this stuff, it should all be available through a standard API that anyone (Firefox, IE7, Google, Yahoo, etc…) could implement and build upon.
Aaron - good stuff. I love the idea of a common standard for rich social bookmarks, though I’m far from knowledgeable enough about what would be required to make such a standard actually happen.