Alas, Xmarks

I started using Xmarks about a year ago.  Xmarks, formerly Foxmarks, is a bookmark sync tool, letting you share a common set of bookmarks between different machines (folks in an office, or home vs work PCs). Unlike the similar tools that Firefox and Chrome are now offering, though, Xmarks is browser-agnostic — it syncs bookmarks between Firefox and Chrome and IE and Safari …

As someone who uses three different browser platforms, and multiple ones on a given PC, that’s pretty darned useful.

It also had features for synchronizing open tabs, histories, etc.  But the bookmark sync stuff was what grabbed me.

Alas, the Xmarks people never managed to figure out how to monetize their resource.  Hosting billions of bookmarks for millions of machines and users, they tried creating some specialized search/recommendation systems, but never got much traction (or money) with them. People just wanted bookmark synchronization, and that’s something Xmarks did very, very well.

Unfortunately, doing something very, very well doesn’t pay for people, or hardware, or bandwidth. So Xmarks will go dark at the beginning of next year. They write of the experience here, and offer advice on what to do next here.

More unfortunately, there’s not a lot to do.  There are no cross-browser bookmark sync tools out there.  Chrome and Firefox and IE’s tools for doing it are limited to the platforms in questions (and the Firefox Sync tool gets very sketchy ratings).

A lot of people are clamoring for Xmarks to adopt a charge model, like so many other utility vendors; I’d certainly pay for it at the moment, but I suspect (from seeing similar efforts) that only a fraction of the voices chiming in would end up doing so.

Fortunately, by making the announcement over three months before they go dark, Xmarks is leaving open those sorts of possibilities, or that someone might still buy them out, or that someone will come up with a real alternative down before then.  So I’m not taking any irrevocable steps, yet.

I do hope some alternative to losing this service comes along. It’s hardly the end of the world, of course, but it’s a real nice Quality of Life feature that I’d just as soon not do without.