Adventures in Bookmarking

Until recently, I had been using Ma.gnolia for my bookmarks. Then they experienced massive data corruption and data loss. this forced me to re-evaluate, and found Foxmarks via a recommendation on Twitter. I really like Foxmarks. Here a little background on what brought me to it. In the early days, I started out like everyone else, using the Firefox’s built in bookmarks. That was in the Firefox 1.x series. It did the job, but when I was on a different machine I had a different set of bookmarks that I had to manage. It’s easy enough when the set of bookmarks is small, but that gets out of control when your set of bookmarks gets significantly larger. If only there was a way to synchronize. I searched the Firefox Extensions and eventually found Bookmarks Synchronizer. This was a great step forward. I now could have one set of bookmarks. There were 2 limitation though. First, the authoritative copy was on the local machine, as that had the most recent edits. Secondly, I had to manually tell it to synch. so I if forgot for a while, it was possible to overwrite newer bookmarks with older bookmarks. I didn’t want to have to manage that. I needed something that had a centralized place where all the bookmarks were kept and then sent to each local machine. Enter del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service with an odd URL. Del.icio.us got around the synch issue by always writing to the server instead of the local machine. This was done using either a bookmarklet, or their toolbar. Then the local browser would download updates from the server. One point of authority, with multiple points of distribution. I was happy for a long time with this solution. It was very easy to add new bookmarks to my collection. I also made use of a feature called ‘bundles’ which allowed me to associate multiple tags together, and then I added these bundles to my toolbar. This was awesome as it allowed me to use the  delicious bookmarks like the native Firefox bookmark toolbar. The downside of delicious was that they never had a good solution to editing bookmarks in bulk. If you wanted to delete 50 bookmarks, it took a long time. With each deletion taking 3-4 clicks, you’d perform approximatey 150-200 clicks. I had far more bookmarks to deal with, so I decided I’d start over – but where? When I went to Gnomedex in 2008, I discovered Ma.gnolia. One thing I really liked about magnolia was their use of OpenID – many sites, one set of authentication credentials. Awesome! Note: If you’re creating a new service, use OpenID out of the gate. Another thing I liked was the UI is much cleaner and better organized that del.icio.us. So I’ll happily computed for a number of months until last friday. That’s when Ma.gnolia experienced massive data loss. As of today (Feb 5, 2009) They’re working hard on restoring their users data, but it’s looking less likely as time goes on. So now what? A few days a friend of mine tweeted about Foxmarks, as Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal had done a write up on Foxmarks and recommended it. It too uses a firefox extension, but it makes use of Firefoxes built-in bookmark system which, with Firefox 3, uses tags. So I’ve come full circle, but I still get all the features I want. Firefox allows you to make use of folders to organize and tags your information, so you get the best of both worlds. The way tags are used is awesome. In the location bar, start typing a tag name. Any items that match that  tag will be listed in the drop down list that appears – regardless of what folder it’s in! I have a folder called ‘Google Apps’. In this, I have bookmarks to docs.google.com, calendar.google.com, gmail.com, www.google.com. That folder sits in my Bookmarks Toolbar. I love how easy it is for me to access these.

Forging Ahead with Thunderbird

The Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation, Mitchell Baker wrote in her blog about the Thunderbird Email clients. To sum it up, Mozilla has realized that they haven’t been giving all the support Thunderbird needs, because it’s big brother Firefox has been getting all the limelight, and correspondingly, all the resources. So to give Thunderbird a fighting chance, a couple of alternatives were presented. However, I’d like to focus on the smaller, more visionary aspect of her posting titled “Broader Mail Initiative”. In essence, what do you think mail should be like in the near future? This is interesting. One of the obvious features is tagging. I’m a heavy Gmail user. I like the tag idea. Admittedly, it took a few days to get used to it, but it now seems much more intuitive. The folder paradigm breaks down when you want to put the message into more than one folder. While I like the Gmail client, I think their simple tagging implementation has something to be desired. The best implementation I’ve seen of tagging is done by the folks at del.icio.us, particularly the Bookmarks sidebar. When clicking upon a tag, it opens a sublisting of other tags. Now that’s cool. Now what if you could overlay your tags with your contacts? so while your message content tags have a blue tag, your contacts would be labeled with a green tag. Good contact management is hard to come by. Outlook is considered the standard, so people write their apps to have parity with it. This is the wrong approach. No one ever got noticed by being like everyone else. Gmail, once again, is a good example. They allow you to add and remove sections to a single contact dynamically, let you name these sections anything. That’s nice. It’s particularly useful when someone works for more than one company, and correspondingly they have separate contact for each company they work for. Another feature I’ve always felt was missing was centralized company information. For example, I used to work at GotVoice. I have several people from GotVoice in my contacts list. Currently, if I want to have the address information in each contact, I have to copy/paste it. I’d rather just link to it. So if I update the corporate address, they all get it. The beauty of web-based email is that its accessible from everywhere, and it’s always in synch. With a client like Thunderbird, as soon as it’s downloaded, you have to access it from that computer. This is the typical consumer case where POP3 is the default. Yes I know there’s IMAP, but it’s not typical. I’d be curious to know what percentage of non-technical email users are even aware of it. So given this scenario, how can you know how much mail you have on your desktop machine. Well, this is where a good publisher extention would come in. At its simplest, you could just auto-publish a report to a URL you specify, so you can read it via RSS from another computer, or even a handheld device. Like Firefox, a key component to success is extendability. So you’re gonna want things like anti-virus, digital identification and certification, and contact management. Integrating with web-services is another key. Some these are already implemented like Plaxo’s toolbar. Integration with Firefox is an advantage that thunderbird can exploit. Let’s say you had a friend who sent you a URL to look at. If you wanted to keep it, you have a “Send to Firefox Bookmarks” menu item, which would also a tag in thunderbird automatically. What about something that lets you tag part of a message, like a quote. This would be particularly useful in a long email. Just to be able to skip down to it, would be a great time saver. Maybe it’s the idea of mail that prevents it from growing? If we thought it differently like as communication, then we can use thunderbird to manage audio voicemail, webcasts, video chats, IM, SMS, and text email. Then we just search through our content that way? It’s too big for just me. What are your thoughts?