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Comment by jsmeaton | Hacker News Reader

Bookmarks are a mess? I was just thinking how crazy it is that people need to outsource bookmark management to a third party.

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When delicious was created, there was no way to sync bookmarks via "the cloud" like browsers do now.

And - crazy as it sounds - there was no really good way to share links. No Twitter or Facebook or Pinterst, so people had to use their blog. Or they could put it on Delicious, and others could subscribe to their feed via RSS (Originally there wasn't a way to view what all your contacts had bookmarked at once).

But Pinterst showed how the "social" side of "social bookmarking" should really be done.

Or they had to email them to their friends! It was a dark age.

I remember showing the original del.icio.us to my friends and them all saying "I don't get it." And then I said "instead of emailing everybody links, you can just post them here and we'll all get them automatically" and they went "Ah! Now I get it!"

But then you have to email your friends to let them know you put a new link out there, so...

Edit: Am I wrong?

I believe the point was that those on Delicious shared links through Delicious, not via email.

Meaning, yes you in the past had to share links via email. Delicious solved that with both parties on Delicious.

Yeah I understood that. But unless your friends are constantly checking for new links shared on Delicious, you would have to notify them that you've posted a new link. SMS, phone call, AIM, email, somehow.

You could subscribe via RSS. I had a bunch of delicious feeds that basically just fed me new sh*t on exactly the topic I was interested in. Because they had been tagged by humans I trusted. It was great ;-)

People actually checked Delicious like they checked Twitter or Facebook.

Or they subscribed in a RSS reader.

I still don't have anything close to a good bookmarking solution that works across all of my devices and applications.

You just ignore that there still isn't. There is a cloud for each browser. Which is not the same. Also it's all or nothing. And it's all public if you consider the current offerings term of services.

With delicious From day one you bookmarklets that worked with anybrowser. And a kickass Mozilla sidebar thingy

Except that Chrome is available on all of my devices.

It's useful to be able to bookmark things from various work computers and share it with your computer at home.

Both Chrome and Firefox do that.

Chrome has a nice feature where you can see what tabs you have open on other computers (assuming you are signed in and have sync enabled). I think Firefox has the same, but I don't use it often enough to have looked for it.

I'll point out the obvious, which is that now your bookmarks are all tied to that browser. Not a huge deal if you don't want to switch browsers any time soon, but it can be nice to sit down at another person's computer and pull things up.

Browsers have had a way to import/export bookmarks as far back as I can remember. 1997?

Manual import/export isn't really a useful option when you are using multiple browsers on multiple machines, let alone sometimes wanting to access things on public machines.

You were also, at that point, restricted to arbitrary hierarchies rather than arbitrary tagging. The ability to slice bookmarks over multiple categories is stupidly useful (for me anyway.)

I believe your Chrome bookmarks can be exposed via your Google Drive account.

And even if you don't want to use the Chrome sync, there's services like Xmarks (which is available for both Chrome and Firefox, and you can also access your bookmarks via a website, and make all or part of them accessible via RSS)

Presumably, this doesn't work if you log into different accounts at home and at work.

Assuming you're not bound to IE or are not particularly anti-Google, this is inherent in Chrome.

Chrome does that for me automatically. This is 2014.

Depends what your needs are. If you're mostly using one browser on one machine you're fine.

Need something that's cross-platform, cross-browser with arbitrary tagging and suddenly you're looking at third party service.

Add to that the discover side of shared bookmarking tools (Gee - I wonder what everybody else has tagged with "foo") and a third party service is the only thing that will help.

I was a really happy delicious used before the post-yahoo rewrite. Then they lost about 1000 bookmarks of mine so I moved to pinboard - where I'm not quite unhappy enough to go write my perfect system ;-)

If you regularly use more than one browser and more than one computer it can be an issue.

not if you use chrome and sign in...

Crome, being just one browser, does not solve the problem.

Exactly. And who is a sucker that sign on chrome? For the sake of humanity, i hope not many people.

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