08 Mar 2005

Dog-eared Bookmarks

How do you keep track of good stuff you’ve found on the web? Years ago, like everyone else at the time, I used to add sites to my bookmarks/favorites, loosely categorised when I could be bothered. Gradually I found myself bothering less often, and as things got bigger and messier the bookmarks were left to stagnate.

More recently I had conversations with colleagues who said they never bookmark, instead relying upon the browser’s history combined with search engines. Some people use their weblog to note down sites, and services such as del.icio.us and Wists (also Furl) offer different approaches. I’m now a Bloglines fanatic for most of my online reading, and have a hand-coded browser home page with several important non-news links on it.

So it seems bookmarking, a feature that’s hardly changed since the first web browsers, has gradually become irrelevant for many. Is this just another example of the unstoppable success of web applications (as with email) and search? It might not be too late for browser makers to show some imagination; perhaps features could be carefully layered on top of basic bookmarking, e.g. combine bookmarks with the browser’s home page and encourage users to drag and drop links around to design their own page?

(related trivia: not many developers realise that IE allowed favorites to be exported via JavaScript, something I never saw used by a site; this was taken out in Win XP SP2 though, despite requiring confirmation from the user)