Xmarks not quite dead yet
xmarks.com
xmarks.com
They seem really attached to the idea that the data (or as they ponderously call it, 'the corpus') they have is very valuable. $9 million (with an impressive $2 mil/year burn rate) later they haven't figured out a way to extract any of that elusive value.
Browser bookmark sync is becoming a built-in feature in many popular browsers. Cross-browser support is an edge case that overlaps with the functionality of a number of web-based bookmarking services which generally offer a richer and more useful feature set than in-browser bookmarking.
In the period of about a week they've persuaded fewer than 30k of their users to maybe pay them $10/yr. This is probably not all that surprising given the above and the fact they've already announced that should they run into difficulties, they'll simply give up. Short of Stockholm Syndrome, it's hard to imagine why anyone would choose to rely on their service going forward, even if someone is foolish enough to buy them out.
Well, wait a bit longer and the price just might become right.
A great solution would be for Delicious/Yahoo to buy Xmarks and integrate the two technologies - your bookmarks are stored on Delicious as they currently are, but synched to every supported browser you use.
That sounds like a personal problem! More seriously, there are several extensions that provide in-browser interfaces and local storage for bookmarking services.
For the hardcore bookmarker, there are even a desktop apps - the ones I know of for OS X are Delibar and Pukka.
Personally, I don't find the browser integration extensions terribly useful. In the case of Firefox, the Bookmark Manager is probably slower than using just about any bookmarking service. It's certainly slower and clunkier than pinboard.
Firefox's Live Bookmarks can also be used to give you a local menu of bookmarks if you point it at the RSS feed of a bookmarking service. I think there are extensions that let you do that in Chrome and Safari as well.
Edit: There's also bookmarklets. These are not a good fit for Delicious. Having these synced as well is wonderful.
This is very scary. This likely means that their data ... No, YOUR private data, is sitting on their servers, completely UNENCRYPTED.
Your bookmarks, your history.
This worries me greatly. If they can use YOUR private data to make money, then they can also give YOUR private data to any government organization that asks for it.
This is stark contract with for example Firefox Sync, which uses strong cryptography that is initiated by the client. The server simply stores encrypted blobs. There is no way anyone can look into your data. Or analyze it. Or sell it. Or give it away. Or get hacked and expose it.
Encrypted data is worth nothing to anyone except YOU the owner.
@xmarks @PinboardIN hey if you've got some good ideas, we're all ears!
@PinboardIN @xmarks the model that has worked well for us is 'charge people money for a useful product or service'
Or maybe this was their strategy for getting enough publicity to get more favorable acquisition offers...
Once reported in "final" blog post - http://blog.xmarks.com/?p=1886
Once reported by Kara Swisher - http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100928/the-long-goodbye-xmarks-...
Bookmark something in Chrome, leave my desk, check the bookmark on the iPad. Surf on the iPad on the train, bookmark some things, review those bookmarks in Firefox on the PC.
The built-in bookmark syncs don't do this, unless you're willing to only use a single browser on everything.
Xmarks does this. If you're a developer using multiple browsers, seems like Xmarks would be essential kit.
For the record, Xmarks today is better than Chrome sync. If things work out for them, I'll move back.
It would take them being insanely better, and offering something that I really need (the 'which bookmarks go where' feature is almost it) to entice me into paying for something I'm getting in-built onto my browser that is free.
It sucks for them, really, because even a year ago I'd have happily paid them the money. Cross-browser (Firefox -> Chrome sync) would have been worth it then, as would the segregation of 'personal' bookmarks from my work PC, but at this point, Chrome sync is in place, it's the only browser I use, and what's left just doesn't convince me to give them money.
I wish them well, but they should have been charging years ago really.
It sure dented my confidence for a bit, I thought we had a deal there.
No, they don't even know that (Xmarks) is running, and I don't even know how to tell then "hey, you should pledge 10 € here..."
That made me think: how many moms and dads are using this service??
Only one person's willing to pay in my family...me :-P
Freemium (get a small service for free, pay for a better one) is one thing but this is "this used to be free, now it's not". At the very least that jars.
I think the real issue is that the likes of ChromeSync make the longevity of this business model very questionable.
Joel Spolsky once described this sort of thing as grabbing nickels from the path of an on-coming steamroller - you're making money out of something that the product should or will inevitably do as a standard feature. Yes there is money there for a while but inevitably the steamroller is going to flatten you.
I no longer see the point in paying XMarks for it...