Xmarks nooooo!

Xmarks Bookmark Syncing Service Shutting Down in January 2011

Well shit. I would have paid, you didn’t even ask. Hopefully I can find another Firefox bookmark sync that was this good.

Their blog post makes perfect sense to me. They built a service that people wanted, but weren’t willing to pay for, and never managed to figure out a business model. Companies like Google can do that indefinitely, because they have enormous cash reserves and other very profitable divisions. Startups have a limited time before their investors’ money runs out.

As for syncing your bookmarks, why not just put your profile on dropbox?

Won’t the local file paths break when synced across computers?

it’s cross platform and cross browser. they don’t use bookmarks.html for all browsers either.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

This cannot be. You can’t be my father!!!

Also, this sucks. It’s my MOST USED feature on my browsers now. :(

Damn, that was my one essential add-on.

i hope lastpass buys em out.

It kills me to see founders so afraid to actually charge for their core offering.

Take the blinders off and try it already. You don’t have to add a lot of bullshit “premium” fluff around a fundamentally useful service just to make money off of it. Get people to use it, encourage them to make it a habit, and then charge for the damn thing.

Delicious seems to work fine and has plugins for all the popular browsers. The bookmarklet works well in mobile safari too!

Some of us don’t want to upload our bookmarks to some arbitrary website, though.

They have fixed costs, like payroll. You can’t just “hope” people will pay when research says they won’t. Shutting down was the right thing to do.

Putting your profile on dropbox works fine. Firefox and chrome also include their own syncing tools now. None of them are cross-platform, though.

Firefox has built-in syncing now? Where at?

I think it is called Firefox sync.

Foxmarks put up a list of alternatives. I’ll give the Dropbox method a shot.

http://www.xmarks.com/about/shutdown

yeah i installed firefox sync but haven’t made any wild changes to test it between computers

Firefox sync and Chrome’s built in sync pretty much ended my use of Xmarks a while back.

Yeah, I’m the same way. I guess I could see how Xmarks would be useful for people who use different browsers though. Shame, they should have at least tried to charge.

So it’s the difference between uploading your bookmarks to xmarks cloud vs yahoo cloud?

I’m not sure if I understand the difference unless there are some privacy concerns specific with delicious. You can mark your bookmarks as private though it’s a bit annoying that you can’t make that the default setting.

There are certain things I don’t trust to be in the cloud but for 99% of my bookmarks I could care less.

Do any of the alternatives offer sync profiles?

Firefox Sync will sync (whichever you select from the list of) passwords, bookmarks, history, preferences and open tabs.

I just used the offline support to upload to my own webserver. I don’t have anything really private in there, it’s just the principle.