Bookmark Management Woes

There is a hilarious segment in The Oval Show Gets a Job where my friend Matt interviews a woman from the now defunct HotLinks.com:

Woman: “It’s all about accessing your favorite links from anywhere in the world”.

Matt: “My favorite links are in Vienna, Austria. Can I access those?”

Woman: “Nope!”

What makes it especially funny to me is the fact that there was even a company formed to manage your bookmarks in the first place. It’s not just a dot-com era thing, either: MyBookmarks.com offers the same service today. Obviously, people are not well-served by the bookmark functionality in browsers.

It’s not surprising, when you look at why people would file a bookmark in the first place. There are a bevy of reasons: to refer as a daily routine; to file for reading at a later time; to send to a friend; to use in research; to create a library for browsing on lazy afternoons. But to use any of those functionalities requires a number of actions at that later time just to get to the page:

1. Open the browser that has the bookmarks–I have several different browsers
2. Find the bookmarks menu, which may not be visible
3. Remember what folder or order it was filed in, or
4. Read through every title hoping to remember the words you used to describe it
5. Open the page by clicking to go to their servers, hoping that they haven’t deleted it
6. Finally, find the information you want within that page

Any one of these steps may be derailed–the page could be gone, you may have bookmarked the wrong page if the original contained framesets for layout, or your bookmarks may even be deleted from the browser, something that happened to me recently. But if you are able to get past all that, you’ve got your information again.

Obviously, the web is not ready for prime-time as a research tool. But thanks to simple technologies, bookmarks may be replaced by much better tools in the near future.

One such tool is weblogs, which allow easy publishing of almost anything online. My linkblog is itself a full weblog, formatted for a simple display. As such, it has all the functions of a full weblog, including search, database storage, import and export abilities, and standard HTML markup. It is stored separately from my computer so that even a hard drive failure wouldn’t delete it. Being published online, it could have comments on each item and be shared by others who see it. To add an item, I can either click a link in my browser toolbar or right-click and select “Post to MT Weblog”, simple as could be.

For those without their own website, Furl provides this functionality and more. They host your bookmarks, and use their pool of subscribers to find out which items have been bookmarked the most that day. They even install a toolbar to your browser that allows one-click search and posting. Most importantly, Furl archives each “furled” page on their servers so that if it disappears from the original site, you still have a copy. One handy use of this could be to “furl” a NYTimes article while it’s still free, to avoid the $2.95 charge for accessing it later.

The killer app, however, will be when these archived items do not simply wait for you to remember them but rather present themselves to you whenever you could benefit from seeing them. Imagine you’re websurfing and come upon the homepage of Bob Ryskamp, whose site (and self-portrait)seems cool enough that you might consider socializing with him. But then you notice your Furl toolbar has an alert in it:

Whew, that was a close one.

The closest current application of this is StumbleUpon, which allows you save bookmarks on their server, publishes them as a publically-available weblog, recommends similar sites to you when you click their toolbar, and allows comments from you and others. However, it still does each of these things only passively, waiting for your click before acting, which makes it only useful when you already know what you need.

And sometimes you really can’t afford to rely on your own brain.