Alternate Take:
- Bookmarking is not broken. Bookmarking works just fine.
What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do.
>What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. [...] We don't know why we really make those bookmarks.
I think a lot of us do know why we save bookmarks. I think your point depends on equating bookmarks with a "future todo reading list". (Similar concept:
https://www.google.com/search?q=tsundoku)
But a more complete taxonomy of bookmarks:
- (1) saved urls for often visted websites like weather, status pages, etc. This saves time from having to recreate the google searches that finally lead you to that url or you found a deep url that bypasses a bunch of clicks.
- (2) an archival "memory" of urls you already read that may be referenced later. The bookmarks are not a "todo list" because the content has already been read. However, a future piece of information may make a connection back to some of them. The personal url archive acts as a more manageable subset of the entire web for reference.
- (3) a future reading list. Bookmarks are an alternative to opening up 100 tabs on the browser to read later
Most of my "bookmarks" are category (2) but I just save the urls in a text file instead of using a bookmark manager. For the really important references, I try to save as mhtml local files.
For me I often feel it's a refusal to accept that life is short and I'll never have time to explore every single thing that has ever interested me in enough depth, and that no matter how much I learn and explore in the time I do have, I'll never be satisfied. So I keep on piling bookmarks on top of bookmarks and thus avoid having to choose what I will intently dedicate my time to.
I gotta bookmark this comment and review it later. Keywords: digital gardening, data hoarding, Buddhism, hedonic treadmill.
There is an idea that might make you feel better - personal libraries (or bookmarks, in this case) shouldn't be just be a collection of books read but of books one would like to read or have on hand for future use.
This change in perspective turns your library from a "failure of accomplishment" to a "curated resource for future enrichment".
> For me I often feel it's a refusal to accept that life is short and I'll never have time to explore every single thing that has ever interested me in enough depth, and that no matter how much I learn and explore in the time I do have, I'll never be satisfied
I love your comment and share your approach: my bookmarks are what will pop up if I search something before Bing tries to take me somewhere else.
By bookmarking, I both accept that I do not have the time (not now or ever) and therefore I may never read this, unless serendipity or need drives me to type the exact same keywoard
> I gotta bookmark this comment and review it later
No, as that would be an attachment: instead, you should let this comment go :)
I think you describe the real problem here. For me I just skip the bookmarking part. If I want to come back to something later, I just leave the tab open. This was a good solution because 2-3 years ago there came an inevitable browser crash and all the open tabs were lost. If you could not remember them, they most likely are not that important.
Unfortunately these hard resets do not occur any more. So I have to close the tabs that I find not that interesting after some days. But closing tabs is much easier than deleting old bookmarks. I assume this is, because you have not commited yourself that much.
Hello, fellow 100+ tab club member. How do you keep your tabs organized? I used Tree Style Tab plus an extension to aggressively unload background tabs. I wish there were a browser where a vertical tree of tabs was the default tan interface instead of a hack around an inferior horizontal bar of tabs.
I used the same extension but now moved to https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery. You can group tabs, set rules (like automatically move to group X if URL matches Y) and much more. Best of all, you can save a snapshot of your tabs to open in the future instead of relying on restoring previous session.
You are right. But the reason is not because we are broken. It is because our tools are not intelligent enough to compliment our tendency to forget. I didn't find a single bookmarking system that reminded me of links I wanted to read later.
I wrote this as a manifesto - https://github.com/joelewis/readmelater and later went on to build a version of that vision not because I wanted to beat that idea to death, but just to scratch my own itch.
I want to be able to refer back to valuable writing I've read online. I read something once about effective use of multiple choice questions in a classroom setting. I'd like to be able to find it again.
I want to be able to browse a curated collection of the web around some topic. I've come across a handful of really, really good tech blogs over the years. I'd like to be able to flip through them in one place. I'd like to be able to peruse my collection of in-browser games.
I want to get faster access to sites I use often. This might be seeding the autocomplete algorithm in the address bar, some kind of launcher, etc. I don't know what form this would ideally take, but it's a use case I want for bookmarks.
Agreed 100%. My bookmarking behaviour has changed massively in this respect over the past 15 years. I used to have a giant bookmarks folder but at some point it became easier to Google for the site first, for a number of reasons:
1) Link rot. I have bookmarks from as late as 2016, that 404 because the site is no longer hosted.
2) With smartphones, my browsing is split across PC and mobile, and I don't sync bookmarks across them (personal preference). This leads to more Google-first behaviour.
3) More and more stuff is getting bookmarked inside of apps. Reddit 'saves', Pinterest 'pins' and Twitter 'bookmarks'.
I find bookmarks work just fine for me in Firefox. However, it only works well for the 10 bookmarks that I use weekly.
If I bookmark anything and I don't use it soon after, it inevitably languishes. I have dozens of bookmarks from years ago for lectures I wanted to watch, tutorials I wanted to follow, games that I wanted to play, blog posts that I wanted to read. It was a list of things I wanted to be or do, but haven't taken the time.
A bookmarking tool can't change whether I have follow through. It's a tool to keep track of things, but I have to spend the time.
The other idea / product that has been beaten to death would be note taking, todo lists, and similar... illusory productivity tools. I say illusory because writing down notes and tasks feels like you're being productive, but they really aren't.
I think these are really popular to be built because they are simple in terms of technology. Most early developers can fit the concept of a todo list in their head - it's what a lot of examples are made of.
And once that technical thing is solved, the emphasis is on design.
And it stops that one important thing being forgotten.
E.g. You having a busy day with 12 fires to fight, you remember 11 but forget that 1 someone text chatted you and you said yes right before person 2 came to your desk and added another etc.
Also I quite like writing a list at the end of the day for tomorrow. For me anyway get the day going well as its laid out there for you fresh, until the new fires arrive!
>And it stops that one important thing being forgotten.
> E.g. You having a busy day with 12 fires to fight, you remember 11 but forget that 1 someone text chatted you and you said yes right before person 2 came to your desk and added another etc.
Funny, I believe in the exact opposite: if you forgot about the 12th, it wasn't as important as the first 11th. By not adding things to any list, I let my mind dynamically curate the priorities and expunge cached entries that I'd like to rationalize as "important"... but that aren't enough for me to bother remembering them.
Forgetfulness can be a wonderful tool, because there will always be more things you may want to do than time. So instead of trying to achieve the impossible, I use this wonderful tool that comes factory installed in all human beings!
I think the GP referred more to those people who write down a lot but (almost) never refer to their notes or review them. For many people, after several years they will have a giant repository of hundreds or thousands of notes with very poor organization and the value decreases rapidly because they can't find anything anymore.
That’s true for me, but I’ve found that the easier and more streamlined my note-taking apparatus is, the less effective it is at helping my memory to congeal. I just keep a scrap of paper handy and jot stuff down occasionally. I’m trying out a Techo this year, so that’s a step more sophisticated. Handwriting seems to be the important bit for me.
I've found hand written notes to be important for me. I have dozens of filled notebooks in my office that I've never read again. The act of writing things down by hand helps to lock them in my brain. I've tried to take notes electronically, but I find I don't retain as much. Something about pen to paper helps me retain information.
True, up to a point. Taking one of the sibling comments as an example, by the time you have accumulated 20.000 notes the older notes will definitely start getting "crowded out" if you don't review them.
I think there are two types of memories, and two types of notes as a result -- there's specific figures where you might only have to remember it for a couple days, and the exact value might be important, so that note/memory's value is very temporal. Then there's the stuff like problem solving strategies, where hopefully that information is integrated into your brain at some deeper level. The former might never be looked at again if it turns out you don't need the figure, the latter might never be looked at if the integration was successful.
Not really - I have old notebooks of notes that I havent thrown away but I also dont review - they are just musings and historical records, really you could throw them out but I like sometimes paging through them and looking at stuff I did.
New notebooks get a label on the front and only when they are full or I retire that hobby do they go in the notebook bin.
Anything which is both conceptually simple and used by/useful for developers is very likely to produce a huge number of variant products. It's a step up from todo lists but think how many text editors there are.
Bookmarking, note taking, todo all have one important characteristic in common. They all require users with discipline and organization skills.
Every indie-hacker is bound to see gaps in existing solutions based on their biased ideas of organizing. Many times these ideas won't work out for the creators themselves as they over-estimate their capacity to maintain discipline over a stretch.
>"I say illusory because writing down notes and tasks feels like you're being productive"
I find tagged notes insanely useful. I can't count enough times when I remember I read something about the subject but have no clue how to find that particular article. Luckily all those end up in whole, clipping and / or link form in my note keeper.
I pay for Pinboard. I have 5K bookmarks and daily add about 1-10 new ones. I will never read most of them. But when push comes to shove, I can easily find that BioTech article that generated a lot of discussion on HN because I tagged it as "hn" and "biotech". And if that article disappears from the web, Pinboard should still have a cached version. So now I can bookmark an article close tab #231 and fall asleep peacefully.
My theory: the larger your bookmark collection grows, the more indistinguishable it becomes from Google. It basically becomes a curated search index. The closest I have come to using bookmarks is through Firefox address bar suggestions from my browsing history.
But Google indexes the whole web. I want a search that works just over the articles I've read.
"What was that article I read a few months back that talked about why you should be able to explain why a fence exists before tearing it down?". It works be perfect for the discussion I'm having with my team right now, but I can't remember the name of the stupid law or where I came across it .
Google is useless in these situations. I need an index contained by my prior search history. Had anyone built this yet?
Is it? I just googled the keywords from your sentence "fence before tear it down" and the first article is titled "Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking"
I use SingleFileZ for saving the bookmark, and then run it through recoll-we to search them. The search is not perfect, but it has augmented my memory several times already.
Firefox only matches the page title and the URL, plus the search box doesn't allow querying by time. Those are the two most common things I need from my bookmark storage.
This is exactly how I've come to use bookmarks. Thanks to Firefox's ability to tag bookmarks, I can add a few tags each time I make one and then a few months down the road when I want to find something I've seen before, I will just search in the address bar (begin with * to search bookmarks). It's been working very well for me.
The problem with bookmarking overall is that it's very easy to click a button to save it for later, but very little of it ends up actually being read. It's basically a nice-to-have list, if there were infinite time and we had infinite energy. But we have neither, so we end up developing personal folder systems or installing extensions or utilizing SaaS, all in the hope that the links won't be dead by the time we can actually read them.
The lack of adoption for paid services (and lack of development for better in-browser functionality) is just our acceptance and recognition that the things we bookmark don't really matter. Any site that matters to you, you'll remember. Any site that you forget about but may need to bring up later, you can just as easily google for. And anything else is generally irrelevant or accepted as ephemeral, even if slightly stimulating.
I casually read a huge amount of interesting technical/business info on the web. But when I want to use that knowledge later (say in a business presentation or technical design), it's nearly impossible to find the original webpage! I can remember the basic idea, but I can't turn it into search terms that are precise enough for Google. ("What was the name of that programming law about tearing down fences?")
What I want is the ability to constrain my searches by pages I've personally visited. Even better would be able to "star" pages to say "this is good, rank higher in future personal searches".
Even FF receives lots of money from Google every year to be default search engine. It's pure speculation but I wonder if the threat of not getting that deal next year is enough that FF doesn't invest in Pocket/bookmarks too much.
Could it be that bookmarking is something people often think they need, but actually, even if they remember to bookmark something they will rarely revisit their bookmarks.
What people really need is a way of recalling instantly every snippet of information from every website they have ever visited on any device in a timely fashion. Which sounds tricky to implement.
My problem with bookmarking has always been that they quickly become just as unwieldy as not having things bookmarked, so finding a bookmarked item becomes really difficult. Plus I forget what I have bookmarked so when I want to read a thing again I don’t think to check the bookmarks. So I’ve largely stopped using them and just use it as a giant “to browse through again eventually” list instead.
Yes that is so true, the extension I made for Chrome changes the new tab page of your browser to all the links you saved.
I did it because even I used to bookmark stuff but then forgets all about it. So having it sticking out to your face every time when you open a new tab will at least make you go out and read it.
Bookmarks used to be useful with Opera up until at least version 12 (around the time they killed m2, their JS perf fell behind and chromes process isolation made it overall more stable.) because the entire bookmarked page was indexed.
Chrome's poor bookmarking must be intentional to push people to search – other browsers poor bookmarking I can't as easily explain – but some browsers used to have better/more useful interfaces for these kinds of things.
So far the best compromise I found (and I found it here on HN, btw) was historio.us, which I have used for a couple years so far, with fairly good results (for my use case, at least).
100% agree that bookmarks need a better solution. Whoever does it will change the game.
I'm a bookmarks hoarder. If I encounter a useful site, I bookmark it.
I have about 20,000 bookmarks on Chrome now.
Someone on HN once described bookmarks as a "knowledge graph". That's an apt description for what they do for me.
I've long given-up trying to neatly organize my bookmarks in folders. Now I use lots of keywords (as pseudo-tags) while saving a bookmark, with the hope that I'll be able to use the correct keywords later when looking for the bookmark.
I would, however, like save them neatly in folders.
In case someone from the Chrome team is reading this, some features that would really change the game for us bookmark hoarders are:
1. bookmarks search: allow us to search exclusively within a folder.
2. bookmarks search: option to search only folder names.
3. when saving a bookmark, give us a search box we can use to search folder names, and then quickly identify and pick a folder to save the bookmark in.
Why do you have to create the folders for your bookmarks yourself? Can you use a classification AI to automatically put the bookmarks in a variety of categories based on the contents of the page?
You would then only need to add tags such as "read this on the weekend", "send to my wife later when I'm not at work" or "use this one in my upcoming blog post".
Otherwise, having them organized would be really handy when you are browsing your bookmarks or trying to find something you saw a few months back but can't remember the right keywords for it to show up in a search again.
If you are interested, check out my bookmarker extension BrainTool. For #3 BT makes it easy to save pages into a folder hierarchy with autocomplete and a tree view. All saved items have associated text notes (which could be #tags) and everything is incrementally searchable, approximating #1 and #4.
A very interesting solution that has worked for me is...Zotero.
Zotero + the web connector basically allows me to do a lot of things that are usually only achieved with paid products. For example, full text search, saving HTML copies offline, linking related websites, adding tags and notes, all of this (and more) is possible.
Very interesting. If you've found a good enough way to import Chrome bookmarks into Zotero, please share how you do it. (Ignore if you haven't, or don't use Chrome). Thanks.
I haven't been able to do so, but considering Zotero uses a SQLite file, and Chrome uses a JSON file, you could hook up a Python script to carry all of them over.
For me they are just piling up. I usually don't delete them and have a seemingly endless list on all of my "bookmark folders" that just keeps on growing -- after a few years some url schemas change or sites go down and the bookmarks don't work any longer.
My biggest issue is that they don't interoperate across browsers. The idea that I would use a single browser is crazy. I don't use a single browser on one device on any of the devices I use. If the browsers treated themselves less like silos, people would be more encouraged to use them for this sort of note taking.
> The idea that I would use a single browser is crazy
Honestly, and as someone who uses >1 browser, you are an outlier.
For the vast majority, you click the "beachball" or the "red fox" and that's how you internet.
And among those that use >1 browser, I don't want bookmarks or other stuff interoped/shared. I'm specifically using seperate browsers to keep things seperate.
I don't know how well Firefox Pocket works, but Google seems to have no issue keeping bookmarks between phone and desktops synced just fine.
Should be easy to fix. Firefox already shares such data with other Firefox instances on other devices. And a UI to export the bookmarks is already present, so exporting to other browsers should be easy to automate.
But, I use Firefox everywhere except for one Android table that because of Google stupidity/cupidity/rapaciousness doesn't have room to install Firefox even though it has a nearly empty 128 GB SD card.
I have had a good experience with the browser plugin floccus, which I use to sync bookmarks to a self-hosted NextCloud instance. It has cross browser support. I have a 'sync' folder that is shared across all browsers/devices, as well as local-only bookmarks on each device (home/work/mobile/etc.)
From a consumer perspective, a product has to be 10x better for me to pay for it. There’s simply no way to make a bookmarking app that’s 10x better - there’s just not that much room for improvement.
Isn't bookmarking == hoarding? Somehow I have the feeling that sure, maybe one day that niche bookmarked piece of information will be useful (or fun), but it gets buried by many other useless bits, so there's a chance it'll never be actually used.
So no thanks, I don't want to pay to rent an extra organisational unit, and feed my obsession.
The problem with bookmarking applications is that aside from a few websites you visit regularly, browsing and searching your bookmarks isn't going to be substantially different from browsing and searching the web, so you can just as well do the latter. If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we're at it). Whatever you come up in terms of search, however, has to directly compete with the quality of Google's search engine.
Well, your bookmarks form a _very very_ small web, with only pages that are guaranteed to be interesting to you.
You're inadvertently hinting towards an elegant solution: forget about trying to organize bookmarks. Instead, just hit a button to add that page to your micro-web, and later only use Google-like full text search for retrieving things.
It's the content search part that browsers are missing -- can anyone confirm whether Raindrop or other bookmarking services do it well?
Not really a web, is it? The web is not hierarchical like the folder/sub-folder structure of a browser's bookmarks; the web has a network organization.
One thing that hasn't been implemented ad nauseum would be a powerful, simple, easy, convenient and effective logic for reorganizing and untangling a hopelessly confused, poorly organized, redundant,
error-infested and ill-conceived hierarchical knowledge base such as an outline of a extensive subject, a decades-old bookmarks folder, or the hierarchical call tree of mission critical enterprise software system.
> If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks
What about:
- browser saves content of each bookmark
- browser’s search bar searches both existing bookmarks _and_ queries the user’s configured search engine
- browser shows results (not too many) from bookmarks above the search engine’s ones (in place of its adverts and removing duplicates would be better, but that might lead to lawsuits about tampering with web pages/deteriorating search results)
Maybe, your browser should also search your entire hard disk, email, etc?
Opera used to do this and I can confirm it was awesome, haven't used Opera since v12 so I don't know anymore. Made the switch back in the day because chrome's process isolation and js engine made it overall faster and more stable.
I wrote this extension years ago when Delicious was still around. Whenever you searched for something on Google, it also did a search on Delicious and displayed the matching bookmarks on top of Google's search results.
> If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we're at it).
Hence the list of bookmarking apps mentioned, :p. I think they're all trying to solve this problem in one way or another.
Bookmarks projects fail to be interesting because simply recording a list of links (maybe with folders or tags or some other categorization method) is something anyone can do trivially in a text file. They add no value because they only focus on the easiest part - simply capturing the link. My bookmarks.txt file is just as easy to use and requires only a text editor. I can sync it multiple computers, organize and search it any way I want, back it up, add notes, etc. In many ways a text file is a vast improvement over the existing solutions.
If you really want to make a good bookmark app, you need to understand that the act of bookmarking, organizing bookmarks, and using bookmarks are three completely separate activities. When you create a bookmark, you want minimal interaction - click the star, maybe add a tag, and move on. When you're organizing bookmarks you want to review and restructure what you've already bookmarked into folders, a mindmap, etc. while taking into account the content behind each link. When you're using bookmarks, you want to leverage that existing organization scheme to find what you want quickly. Most bookmark features/plugins are decent at the first step of capturing the link, but are terrible at or completely ignore the rest.
I would love to see a bookmark app that was designed in the spirit of "Getting Things Done" - where ideas are captured quickly but then funneled into a system where they are later reviewed regularly and acted upon. Just capturing a list of bookmarks and regurgitating them to the user is not sufficient and can be easily replaced with a text file.
> Finally there is no problem to be solved in the first place. And everyone is creating a solution in search of a problem.
Personally I stopped using bookmarks except for something temporary that I use multiple times a day for a short period of time (e.g. work related notes, designs etc). The more general purpose solution is, well, Google because at the end of the day you will have a huge bookmark list that you will have to search through anyway.
The author suggests bookmarking is broken in all browsers.
I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome.
I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar.
If I have to click on the >> arrows to expand I might just as well Google it.
So yes my simpler guess is that browsers bookmarking is indeed good enough.
No it's not. It's a conscious minimalist choice.
My booksmark bar in Chrome fits 18 links.
There is more links than the websites I use daily or even monthly.
I think having more links than that it's HOARDING.
You have the feeling of creating value by saving the links but in practice you won't use most of them and anyway you have history and search to help you out.
Chrome even remove the bookmark bar by default. You have to add it back.
That is to say Bookmarks is for power users and the most powerful ones are probably just being collectionist rather than pragmatist.
You're just not a bookmark user. Many people are, and Chrome is a much worse browser for those people than, say, Firefox where you can display a persistent bookmarks column. I have a folder with a couple dozen bookmarks of webcomics I read. I have a bookmarks folder with studies and papers regarding points of contentious online discussion I can reference without relying on Google. I have a folder of blogs I enjoy. I have a folder of bookmarks for various projects I find interesting, and every couple of weekends I pick one and give it my best shot. I have a folder of reference pages and sales pages for my project car.
in practice you won't use most of them
No, you won't use most of them. Because you're not a bookmarks user.
Just checked and Chrome allows bookmarks allows for folders.
You can create 18 folders in the bookmark bar and those can even have nested folders.
I think that's a LOT of folders and a LOT of flexibility even if you need it.
Competitors to any bookmarking product include: social media / Reddit / HN, messaging / Slack, and of course Google.
I used Google to find an old tweet of mine to get a link to an old product today. It was very easy.
Any specific bookmarking app adds an extra step to any URL you would record on any other website in its context. So the solution is basically amounts to organizing uncontextualized URLs (hard to remember anyways) or make a somewhat useless record when there's a more contextualized record elsewhere.
A better tool would be something which captures URLs in their context. Like dated list of HN posts/comments I upvoted. Dated list of interactions with Jira. Etc.
Same thing with Spotify Liked Songs. That's basically bookmarks for songs. It's just A) better integration and B) social-it is it's own contextualization.
Local approach is a personal wiki; just drag the page to be 'bookmarked' into a relevant page on the wiki (or just a '/tmp' page for later sorting). I generally add the page title as the link name, makes for easy searching later. For example, I'd file this story as:-
* [https://ruky.me/2022/02/01/ideas-that-have-been-beaten-to-death/ Ideas that been beaten to death] (ruky.me)
** [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166357 HN discussion (2022)]
This shows up as a list of link in the wiki output:-
* [Ideas that been beaten to death] (ruky.me)
* [HN discussion (2022)]
The link for HN comments is so often used I've got it in a dedicated F key :)
Guilty as charged! I'm building my own 'unique' take on bookmarks[0] (really it is unique ;-) .
I think the reason this comes up is that people have more and more stuff to keep track of, and more and more of peoples stuff is accessed in a browser. Not so long ago there were standalone apps for email, word processing, spreadsheets, group chat, bug tracking, CRM etc etc. Now all of that stuff is inside some web app I get to in Chrome - me all all the other billion+ knowledge workers using Chromium. Thats why everyone has 50 tabs open at any given time.
When almost everything I want to track has a unique URL it opens up possibilities and the browser builders have not been keeping pace.
I've tried many products and approaches – until I landed on https://raindrop.io.
That's my favorite tool now for capturing videos, bookmarks, articles, etc content.
Totally worth the price - especially due to the permanent copies. There have been multiple times where the content disappeared from online shortly after I found it, but since Raindrop.io had a backup, I got to read it still.
My closing words: Stop searching for the best manager and make Raindrop.io your new friend :)
DISCLAIMER: I'm in no way connected to the service nor will I receive anything for endorsing it. I'm just a really happy customer.
I don't know about everyone else, but I usually bookmark to read later. I built a simple bookmarking webapp for this while in university over 10 years ago, pre-Pocket, even.
The thing is, I usually don't read it later.
Next time you bookmark something to read later, or send it to yourself, or whatever you do - maybe stop and ask: am I actually ever going to open this again?
Chances are you're reading articles to procrastinate, and if it's too long or not interesting enough to read even then, bookmarking it is just procrastinating on the procrastination.
I feel like an outlier in that I find bookmarks extremely useful. When I start a new project, I create a bookmark folder related to that project. I bookmark any web references I looked at during the course of that project. Then later I can remember "Oh yeah I did something like this in X project." and go peruse those bookmarks. I actually find it pretty fun to go back to old project folders and checkout what kind of stuff I bookmarked in the past.
I feel that the solution to this would be some kind of generic online storage solution. Like Excel, but for the whole web, where you can put any kind of data in, get an address (a web-ified pointer) to it, and be sure that you can look it up again at any time, from anywhere, using the address key.
A generic online storage system with Excel-like properties.
If that existed, then people would use it for bookmarks, and probably also for a host of other types of online storage needs.
Oh I’ve been building one! But mine is truly different™, basically I gave up the idea of organizing bookmarks, in favor of searching them instead, building your personal search engine
no it would be online, not the pages you visit but the ones you bookmark, I’m thinking of building a browser extension that watch your bookmarks and sends the links to be scrapped and indexed
I pay for Pocket, it's been my main bookmarking tool for years ever since Feedly got too intricate for my needs. I was a founding member of Feedly when Google Reader went down but it got too many features and too complicated for my taste.
Yet, todo lists are about keep tracking of items you will tick off. They are no meant to be perpetual. Bookmarks can be. I have bookmarked intranet systems for that exact reason.
So basically I tried to solve the 'Bookmark Problem' by creating a simple user focused search engine, user builds a list of bookmarks, and the app, Mrkff, allows you to search your bookmarks as if it were google, but tailored to your own content.
If you would allow me to plug my own personal bookmarking app - Mrkff [0] - pronounced `Mark off`. I went through YC in 2019 for it, and I launched it in 2020.
I also built a cross-platform web-extension for it too using a small framework (Desolate-Zero) I made for the web extensions to make use of all the features of both chrome and firefox. It just a simple click extension and click bookmark and the server takes care of the rest.
Basically I opted to make a full-text searchable version of every webpage I bookmark. A copy is also stored on the server, I intended to paywall downloading the actual webpage text, but make it searchable in the free version. This way I can search for obscure words or phrases that were on the webpage that I remembered while not remembering the actual webpage. I had an auto tag system on it too derived from the actual text of the web page. V2 is set to expand from text to video, pdf, audio etc.
I had a lot of fun with it, but this version is lacking in certain aspects, and I've spent the last 6 months working on version 2 of this app. I certainly didn't know how widespread this type of app was to be honest. But I use my solution on the daily, so I'll probably continue working on it.
Have you considered B2B? A lot of small companies would love shared bookmarks to have some employees discover more easily things that were previously bookmarked by other employees.
Like a shared knowledge base? I hadn't thought about it like this before, but thank you. As I'm writing this all the possibilities are just flooding my mind. I will be looking into this for V2. Thank you so very much.
give me your email and let's talk :) I can try to introduce you to first potential clients. This way you'll confirm product market fit.
Think simple: even something that could just ingest bookmarks from chrome/edge sqlite database and process them into a custom search engine (that would NOT expose said links to say google, even if they are public links) using good old tf-idf would be extremely valuable.
What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do.
We don't know why we really make those bookmarks.
Bookmarking is not broken. We are.