Google’s New Bookmarking Service, Previously Called Stars, Has Gone Live | Hacker News Reader

Google’s New Bookmarking Service, Previously Called Stars, Has Gone Live

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101 pointsapplecore92 comments

Bookmarks seems like an outdated technology. With the resources Google have, it would be cool if they could create a site where you can follow other sites as they update. Perhaps this site could then even differentiate between different 'streams' or 'feeds' from sites. And in this workflow you could add the 'stars' to articles and updates you would find interesting.

I hope someday they will create or have this system evolve into something like that, which would be a lot more useful.

A great name for this product would be Google Reader!

Or Pinterest...

"Bookmarks seems like an outdated technology." Sorry, I disagree. I use this all the time on my phone. Bookmarks allow me to quickly access pages without a lot of typing on my phone.

> Bookmarks seems like an outdated technology.

I agree. I made http://fetching.io because I hate having to remember to save something just to easily find it later. Everything you see should be indexed and easily searchable.

Your privacy policy page returns a 404...

404 for me too.

Manually changed the URL to http://fetching.io/privacy/ (guessed) and it worked.

looks interesting, would be interested into understanding how it works. Also got a 404 when I visited http://fetching.io/privacy-policy

Cool! I was just thinking about building something like this myself, after reaching the point where I save almost everything I read to Diigo, just to get searchability.

There are lots of services like this. I made https://historio.us/ back in 2009, when no full-text service existed (as far as I recall).

Google Now shows me two or three cards with articles each day. They seem to be based off of my search history so sometimes they aren't relevant and they are occasionally duplicated in newsstand but I think they're heading in that direction.

The sources of the articles I get recommended on Now are always really spammy looking blogs.

I had to return here because I got whooshed by your comment. (I see now some have picked up on it.)

I totally agree. I think we should have "personal search engine". May be a chrome plugin or something. It keeps track of every webpage I visited and searches those pages to get to relevant information. If I view "Thai Red Curry recipe" page some months ago, when I search for the term again, the plugin should be able to bring up the same result based on amount of time I spent on the page. This way, I have access to stuff that I forgot to bookmark.

I am afraid in this case Google has become headless chicken and evolution now goes backward.

We built http://filr.io for the same purpose. You can follow feeds from various content sources. These feeds could be based on rss or any kind of content that changes over time.

Everything you read is tracked as read/clicked so that you can search using those filters. Also tagging and creation of own channel(invite only) is allowed.

Examples:

http://filr.io/channel/hackernews

http://filr.io/channel/Wikipedia-Picture-of-the-day

http://filr.io/channel/imdb-posters

With all these different ways of doing it, we're going to need some sort of syndication. It would need to be really simple though.

Maybe we could use XML as a standard format.

Really simple syndication? Impossible.

The problem with RSS is that the publisher needs to support it, and quite a few are actively moving away from it. For example, Wikipedia Picture of the Day RSS feeds don't work anymore: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Press_releases/Pi...

Also, considering the "fire-hose" nature of typical RSS feeds, there needs to be an intelligent layer that sits between it and the user for it to be useful.

> considering the "fire-hose" nature of typical RSS feeds, there needs to be an intelligent layer that sits between it and the user for it to be useful.

I have to disagree with that, I enjoy my RSS feeds uncensored, if a feed has too low of a signal to noise ratio then I unsubscribe. I have a few of my own filters set up in InoReader for stuff that I'm absolutely sick of hearing about, but none if it is filtered for me "intelligently".

There are plenty of services built on top of RSS that do filter and remix the content already, however.

newsblur has trainable filters.

My company is developing a product to make bookmarks useful again. Sadly, this is an area that hasn't seen much work.

We've though about getting streams of data (RSS feeds, etc.) that automatically come in, but we haven't really decided which direction we'd like to go with it. We're currently focused more on core functionality, just making sure that it's insanely fast to save and find links (and to make sure they stay out of your e-mail inbox).

Would love to hear your thoughts, or if you'd be interested in trying out our private beta we would love the feedback. If you're interested my contact info is in my profile.

Ok, now I just re-read your comment and figured out the joke. That's some serious sarcasm talent, haha. Still going to (mostly) keep my comment though because of all the other comments that refer to this as "bookmarking" or mention "fixing bookmarks" with some sort of feed.

These are entirely different systems to me. We just happen to use bookmarks to keep track of feeds / updating websites. I have lots of bookmarks I keep for static content that I want to refer to constantly. Blog posts, specific documentation pages, Stack Overflow answers, etc. It's nice to just begin typing "Python async..." chrome's suggestions will show me my bookmarked link. I've been looking into a better way to do this as my bookmarks grow, searching by page content would be a nice feature too. (I hear about Pinboard a lot on HN, and I've been meaning to look into it. This manager seems neat as well. However that's for another comment/thread).

But that way of using bookmarks is a different goal than "bookmarking" a news website, a forum, etc. And I agree with you in that regard, that bookmarks still seem the best way to manage this is sort of silly. What you describe is something else, and certainly something which would be useful, but it's not a bookmark. A bookmark doesn't tell you when your favorite author has released a new book, or turn the page in a book for you. It holds a specific page that you'd like to return to, and it does that job very well.

Disclaimer: I'm just a User.

Though it has it's rough edges, but after using it, for a year, I think, It's awesome. Dragdis[0] actually solves a lot of bookmarking problems. And they have mobile app coming, which is really nice to use (in closed beta now). And the fact that you can bookmark just about anything you wan't. Not just a page, but for example a specific fragment of code/text/video/etc. and the link will be associated automatically. And when searching or browsing through your collection, your "dragged" info appears first rather than link. See for yourself [0].

[0] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dragdis/fiekimdgbp...

Yea.. bookmarking sucks. All i do is export every month to sites I barely visit again. Something better has to be created.

A self reply rather then edit: I'd also like to share my bookmarks, to which I have added the touch of folder organization..

I actually think Google could, in spite of themselves, be on to something that they may not even realize yet. Actually, I think fetching.io is onto something that they may not be aware of either.

I was about to ask if you knew of iGoogle but I guess that was dicontinued in '13

I used to use Google Notebook and Google Reader. I saved many notes and tagged many articles. Google suddenly discontinued both. I am not going to invest any effort into learning/using any Google service without some assurance that it is going to be supported at least 5 years.

Same here. Notebook was a like a brain dump for me and it saved my bacon quite a few times while pinning research. In fact, when Pinterest came out, I couldn't help but not the similarities (except, of course, for the glaring differences) Notebook was like textual "pinning". It was interesting to go back and see lines of thought in mid progress.

Evernote wasn't quite the same for me.

Yep and I used Google Bookmarks too, so that I could get to them from everywhere, but it was dreadful if you had more than a few tags (massive load of HTML loaded for each tag which made a huge tall page) and was clunky.

I've moved to pinboard.in (of course).

It's just a way to manage your bookmarks, right? You can export and import bookmarks pretty easily, and this doesn't change that.

It's definitely a concern when using some of the more far flung google products that this can happen. My company is developing a similar product (though it's going to be going beyond what is here).

We intend to stay in operation for a very long time! It's a product we need ourselves and we pour our blood, sweat, and tears into it. We're in private beta currently and if you'd like to try you can contact me (info is in my profile)!

There is no point in betting on something that has a 50/50 chance of disappearing in a few years to store your valuable bookmarks — especially when (I assume) cross-platform support will be lacking.

Use Pinboard instead.

My first thought when I saw the announcement: "When will it be discontinued?"

Unless you're like me and you don't consider your bookmarks to be very valuable. If google kills it, so be it. In the meantime, it's a one-click add to chrome and it has a prettier interface than the standard bookmarks manager. might as well use it.

Pinboard will be there when the Earth falls into the sun, for sure.

> There is no point in betting on something that has a 50/50 chance of disappearing in a few years to store your valuable bookmarks

If its convenient for use now and there is a a very high probability that, if discontinued, there would be a convenient export mechanism and a significant period in which to use it, then even if there is a "50/50 chance of disappearing in a few years", I don't see why it wouldn't be a good place to store bookmarks.

I feel that this "it will disappear" notion right behind every Google announcement slowly tends to get some witty meme. We all know every service will end.

Really so you expect Google Search or GMail to just wrap up at some point ? Be serious.

It is those services from Google that don't contribute to revenue to be wary of.

I'm with you. I should've written: We all know every service will end, therefore this notion is useless.

I doubt that the average google product lifetime undercuts the average overall product lifetime.

The eager user in me is delighted there's a place to save my bookmarks.

The paranoid user is worried Google will have access to my saved sites and sell my usage stats.

The nostalgic user is still irritated that Google Reader could have still been saved and this feature appended.

Google sells targeted ads, not usage data.

Where's the difference?

Whether third parties see information about your online behaviour or not. Is that not clear?

In selling usage data:

Someone pays Google, gets your usage data (and can do with it whatever they want).

In selling targetted ads:

Someone pays Google and gives them a specification of what kind of people they'd like to see the ads, and Google uses the usage data they already have to select who to show the ad to.

At the end:

In the former case, Google and the third party both have your data.

In the latter case, Google has the data, and the third party does not.

The end goal is the same but the only party with your information is Google as opposed to a third party.

ahem https://developers.google.com/bid-manager/guides/data-transf...

I'm not sure what you think that page describes, but it's NOT a way to buy data about how a person uses a google product.

You see, I know exactly what this page describes ;-)

> The paranoid user is worried Google will have access to my saved sites and sell my usage stats.

Google doesn't have access to your bookmarks if you set your Chrome sync encryption password to something other than your Google password. When first launching the new bookmark manager, you'll even get a privacy message in the manager reminding you that Google does not have access to your custom sync encryption password.

FYI, there is a https://www.google.com/bookmarks/ which is a completely different service.

Which they seem to not care about - maybe they'll sunset it and finally force me to do the work to get off the outdated platform.

Those "bookmarks" mostly appear to be locations I've starred on Google Maps.

Why wouldn't they merge that with the Chrome bookmark sync? Many years back there used to be a section in Google Docs (I think that's what it was called at the time, well before the switch to Drive) where I could see all of my bookmarks; if I was away from my personal computers, I could still see the links without syncing chrome. I switched to Xmarks just for that feature.

Granted, now I always have my phone with me which has the sync. But it still seems odd that they wouldn't give us web access to that data.

The old Google Bookmarks can't be merged with Chrome bookmark sync because Bookmarks uses tags while Chrome uses folders. The same URLs would end up getting duplicated in several folders.

I made the mistake of heavily using this after delicious went away (and is now back :S). I'm at a loss at what I should do now.

Pinboard. It is great.

I use this because it does one important thing that I want to do with bookmarks: it allows me to search the content of the pages I've bookmarked. Basically it's a mini Google Search that only searches pages I've bookmarked.

I basically use it as a selective history that is easy to search. I do almost no tagging or adding descriptions because I don't need to.

It's too bad development has ceased on Google Bookmarks and I hope any new bookmarking tool from Google has this feature.

If any members of the Google Data Liberation Front are reading HN today, is this on your radar to support? Failing that, any word on an API into the service behind it?

Idlewords should budget for a couple new servers in about... 2 years or so?

Tangentially related.For long tail queries, Why is there no "research mode" on search engines?

Often times, I find myself searching for some term like "Commute Home Traffic app" on app store (For market research purposes). Google, Apple, Bing, all give a huge list of results but I cannot go through them in a single sitting. So, I should keep the window open and keep clicking next occasionally (Spread over multiple days).

If I do the same search again, these search engines return same order of results I am unhappy with. Is there no solution to this problem? Can't they remember which results I am not interested in and stop showing them? Can't they let me continue my "research" where I left off from?

I find in this situation, sifting through more pages doesn't help, you'll need to continually refine your query. There's never been a point where I've gotten to page 2 on Google and thought "This information is good, but I'd like to keep going further to find more."

Take the "Commute Home Traffic app" term you provide as an example. Searching for that within the Play store, the results are pretty terrible once you even go as little as scrolling below the fold. The first 10 apps displayed seem somewhat useful, then the next 30 or so are just variations of the same apps but specific to a city. Then beyond that, bus map apps specific to a city, a ride-sharing app, apps specific to news stations, some alarm clocks, etc...

It'd be much more beneficial to search with a new term now that we've learned what results we get, instead of looking through 100 more apps. Something like "Commute Traffic San Francisco" or a different query altogether.

I can count on my fingers how many times I've found useful results past the first page of any search engine.

I often do market research queries. For example, I would like to see if there is an app that focuses on "real estate or home buying simulation"...If you search for this in google, first few pages of results are for training agents. I frequently go beyond first page in the hope of finding a long tail result that fits my needs.

While this is nice I'd like really like something that will not only save a bookmark to a particular page but a snapshot of it as well - maybe an HTML version but a screenshot or PDF would also be great. That seems to be the kind of problem Google could solve.

If Stars has an API, you could do this by kicking off an archive task at the Internet Archive, and replace the bookmark link with the immutable URL from the IA.

Pinboard does this IIRC.

It does and I really like that feature, well worth the money. It's kind of sad if you see the stats on how many of your bookmarked sites are not available any more after a few years.

"Clip full page" in Evernote Web Clipper does a nice job snapshotting the current page, even if it is behind a login.

My company is developing a product that does just that. We've been very focused at making bookmarks and links more useful and easier.

It's going through a lot of development and currently in a private beta. If you're interested my contact info is in my profile and we're looking for all the feedback we can get.

Edit: We're actually also very close to having a pretty good full page archiving solution as well. It's not 100% yet, but there is still a lot of good there already.

Not exactly the same thing, but you can save pages to your mobile devices for offline viewing with the Chrome to Mobile extension.

What about the ability to collaborate with other users on a shared bookmark folder? It would be useful if multiple users could add bookmarks to the same shared folder.

Also how do I access my bookmarks if I am at a friends house and don't have my computer or phone on me. Do I have to login to my chrome account on their chrome browser? What if they don't have chrome installed? It would be nice if they had a basic website I could access from anyones device, where I could login and view all my bookmarks.

I think the auto folders is the most innovative part of the app. I will have to use it more but I feel like I would stop creating folders and just add links.

My company is making precisely this product. We have a fair amount of work todo, but we have a usable private beta right now. You can't collaborate quite yet, but it's on the horizon.

If you'd be interested you can find my contact details in my profile!

I used SiteBar (http://sitebar.org) for the shared bookmark folder function about 10 years ago. Still looks the same ;-)

Finally a place to store my 50,000 unsorted bookmarks from the last 20 years :/

As others have said bookmarks seem to have outlived their usefulness, the idea makes sense but managing them is tedious.

> the idea (bookmarks) makes sense but managing them is tedious

What sort of bookmark management tasks do you find yourself spending lots of time or effort on?

Primarily categorization and then searching.

Trying to make folders to categorize websites but I end up with multiple folders for the same website and the mess grows.

The fewer folder categories the better. For my files I try to keep it simple and have just Media, Applications, Documents as the top level folder. Media would break down in to pictures and video then video into TV, movies. Documents and Applications would also break down a bit more.

The other problem is the websites I gather tend to get added faster than I can categorize them which is compounded by the multiple category problem.

Searching do I search by time or category? Sometimes time is easier if it was recent but then later on, years later, it's easier to search by category.

In the end I get frustrated and dump it all into one giant pile probably never to be viewed ever again.

Oh that's interesting, why not just use tags though? One bookmark gets any number of tags, and then you just have to be somewhat consistent about your tag choices. The first few hundred bookmarks are usually tagged poorly, and then after that you get into a consistent naming pattern.

https://github.com/davidlazar/jotmuch

I think I've tried tags maybe on bookmarks maybe it was some things else.

I am a fan of them maybe I drifted away from them for some reason.

I've used a variety of services similar to this over the years; delicious, spurl and currently diigo.

My use case works like this:

1) find an interesting website / article 2) highlight a paragraph 3) click the magic button (ie: diigo's chrome extension button) 4) save the url along with the high lighted text and a tag 5) my blog then pulls in this info from my diigo user's rss feed and displays it to visitors

I'll be checking out google's effort, but I can't see me moving away from diigo unless I have to.

would love to get your comments on our efforts at Surfmark (now focused on education but still open for everyone) required disclaimer: founder, surfmark

Will this break my xmarks collection and, after I've added content, can I revert the new stuff back into xmarks later? I have been shepherding my collection since before del.icio.us had a bookmarklet, indeed since Netscape. Xmarks, despite its warts, at least it has cleanup tools I can us now and again, and I can take it with me to Firefox or Safari if needs be.

there was a need for this? yet somehow reader had to die?

This is the perfect opportunity for someone to build a comparable service to swoop in & save the day when this gets shut down.

It doesn't seem to even index the bookmarked pages, what is the point ?

Don't feel very enticed to move away from Pocket at the moment...

People, just use Pinboard.

It looks like Pocket

It looks like a Flat UI version of the chrome web store to me.

Dead pool? Or maybe we should call it a fewer-arrows more-wood pool. Or even "haha you gave us your data" pool. If I were cynical, a "do you dumbasses ever learn" pool.

I've got $10 on Oct 2016. A nice round 2 years.

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