Bookmarks. A big problem someone needs to solve.

I honestly can’t believe I’m blogging about this in 2012 but it is true, Bookmarking is still an issue, and a big one. As usual, let me describe my scenario.

I use 4 PC and one Phone, 3 of them run Linux, 1 is a Macbook. 2 of them are at work, the rest at home. I use all browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari on both my Linux boxes, the Macbook and the iPhone. My two primary browsers are Firefox and Chrome, depending on the machine I’m using.

The problem is that I want my bookmarks to follow me, I want them organized, I want them private and I want them smart. I would pay for a service that does this. For years I used Delicious, I thought it was great at the time, but then Yahoo stopped supporting it and Firefox upgraded to their crazy new release cycle and the Delicious add-on for Firefox stopped working for a few months. Bad timing.

That’s when I tried Xmarks, recently acquired by LastPass. Not a very good choice. Now I’m using Google Bookmarks, and still, I have problems.

So what are the problems? I’ll name a few:

1. The browsers problem. If I used only one browser I’d be OK, but I use multiple.

2. Delicious doesn’t accept Tags with spaces.

3. Delicious doesn’t have private bookmarks, or at least, not that I know off.

4. Xmarks is the best service to save and sync bookmarks but is the worst when you are searching. It creates a jungle.

5. Browsers come with a solution to sync bookmarks, but they only work with one browser, Firefox has a great system, Safari, Chrome and Opera too, but they only work great within that same browser.

6. Google Bookmarks is a great service, easy to bookmark, easy to search, but only if you use Chrome.

7. Google Bookmarks add-on for Firefox is not really good, I actually need to login everytime I use the service and I can’t use the little star in the address bar to bookmark a webpage. Maybe if Google made an official add-on the problem will go away.

Someone please solve this mess, I seriously thought LastPass was gonna solve this problem when they bought XMarks, after all their product to save passwords is just incredible good.

I’m mostly using now getPocket.com (formerly read it later). It is not a proper way to save Bookmarks but it’s a perfect example of how a good service should work. Really easy to bookmark, great to find what you bookmark, follows you everywhere, awesome iPhone app, good third party support and getting better and it’s cloud based so it works on every browser out there. The only problem is that I’m using a service that is not quite designed to bookmark webpages.