2009/08/05

Google bookmarks goes social?

Not yet, but it needs to. I love having all my bookmarks hosted in the cloud, but I never could get into del.icio.us or similar social bookmarking sites. They just didn't have the feel I was looking for. However, I feel naked without my Google Toolbar in Firefox, but the reason I'm so hooked on it is due to the bookmarks. I have countless bookmarks in there and I can't begin to describe how many times I've been thankful I can access these bookmarks and manage them so easily from any browser anywhere.

Before I start sounding like a paid advertisement for Google Bookmarks, there are a few flaws with the service that grate on my nerves quite a bit, yet I feel I am in way too deep to switch to any other bookmarking service now. First of all, why oh why can't Google Chrome integrate with Google Bookmarks*? Why, Google? I'm sitting here shaking my fist at you. I might be glaring at my screen a little, too. The other thing, too, is that it would be nice to simply have some sharing options and possibly other social elements. Sharing at the very least though, come on. I don't want to have to manually create a list of bookmarks and send them to people, that's just ridiculous. I don't want to have to "export" my bookmarks for someone else to import, either. That's just lame. What year is this again? Wake up, Google! You're supposed to be industry leaders, yet sometimes you act like these things shouldn't be a given in practically everything you create. I'm shaking my fist at you again, Google. Hopefully these things will be addressed soon.

*UPDATE: Ars Technica just released this article detailing Google's intent to implement this very feature (plus more integration between Chrome and your Google account) last night. Excellent news!

Here are a few of the juicy tidbits:

"A bunch of us have been working on a feature to sync user data in Chromium with a Google account..."

"The Chrome synchronization framework will initially handle bookmarks, but it is designed to support other kinds of browser data in the future..."

"...more seamless than other bookmark synchronization services like Weave and XMarks..."

"...a Web interface so that users can remotely access their bookmarks from any browser by logging into their Google accounts."

To get early access to these features, keep your eyes glued to the developer update channel for the update in about a week.

Ars reports that Windows' dev channel should be getting the feature enabled first, with possibly Linux at the same time or soon thereafter, but Mac OS X currently does not have support for the sync features.

Here are some simple instructions for enabling dev channel updates, if interested: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel


Talk about ironic! Can we get to work on the bookmark sharing now?



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