Has anybody seen my bookmarks?

Do you keep your bookmarks in your browser? I did too – about 2,000 of them, until I suddenly had 1,600. Only, it wasn’t so sudden. Gradually, entire directories became empty, but they were bookmarks I used infrequently, and it happened over a period of months. So, I didn’t notice for a long while.

What happened? I’ve been a long time user of Xmarks ever since it was FoxMarks, and I’ve relied on it to synchronize all the bookmarks that I have between all the browsers I use – Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome – across two Macs and a PC. But, the complexity of all the machines and the browsers I use seems to have pushed it over the edge.

I’ve always kept a lot of bookmarks in my browser. Maybe it’s out of habit, maybe it’s just because it’s just so convenient to have them there right at my fingertips. They might have stayed there forever until this crisis pushed me to do something different. I decided that browser-based bookmarks are too fragile and temperamental, and if you want to preserve your investment in your bookmarks, you better get them in the cloud ASAP!

Aren’t your bookmarks the most personal, relevant, and best links that you have flagged in your travels around the Internet? Yet you’re just sticking them in your browser?

I decided that in spite of the pain in the ass it was going to be moving them, it would be much better for me to move all my bookmarks to the cloud just like I have with my contacts, my to-dos, and all of the other important data that I use on a regular basis. I knew that it would also make it easier to access my bookmarks from all my mobile devices and my iPad. The only question was which one to use.

I was familiar with the territory, and I knew there are really three strong options: Delicious, Pinboard, and Diigo. Delicious is the old-time standard for social bookmarking, and I’ve been popping bookmarks on it for half a dozen years. What I had there was kind of a jumble of best practices and random bookmarks that I had decided to make public. When Delicious almost bit the dust a couple of years ago I became aware of Pinboard, Diggo, and some of the other alternatives.

Since it’s near-death experience with Yahoo, Delicious has come back strongly and has a very nice web experience. However, it took me a long time to find a decent iPad and mobile app for it which I found very surprising. In spite of the fact that that using the web interface is really pretty pleasant, I found it had some serious shortcomings. For one thing, there’s no need of support for importing bookmarks any longer! It asks you to rely on other tools. That’s shocking to me, and indicates that perhaps Delicious is still on shaky ground and not a place that I want to rely on for the long-term.

On the other hand, I started finding a lot of nice things to admire about Pinboard. It has a fast and light techie feel. It’s quick and very responsive. It’s the type of tool that appeals to the technorati and people who are to get not afraid to get their hands dirty by doing a little coding or by building extensions. Because of that, there are a number of excellent apps and interfaces that work with it. Plus, it will do a bunch of amazing technical tricks like automatically importing all your tweets. There’s a lot under the hood if you want to tweak and optimize it.

Coders have leveraged Pinboard to do some very interesting things, and in fact it could even be used as a substitute for Pocket or Instapaper as a “read it later” type of client. But I digress – my main purpose was to create my own personal Google of the bookmarks I’ve collected over the years, and move them into the cloud where they would be available to me from any machine and any browser. Since I am mobile whenever possible, one of my key criteria was to have excellent mobile and iPad apps – which Pinboard excels at.

The other resource I took a look at was Diigo. I’ve always been a bit on the fence about Diigo. It looks like an excellent, almost academic research tool, that allows you to annotate webpages and share groups of bookmarks with people. It’s got some interesting features, but it has a a very web 1.0 feeling to it. If you compare Diigo to something modern like Pinterest, you’re really looking at two dimensions versus three dimensions. There’s a very big difference. Diigo has some decent mobile and tablet tools, but just seems a little complicated for what I wanted to do – which is simply take my bookmarks off of my browser and put them in the cloud so I can get to them easily at any time.

I selected Pinboard. I cleaned out my bookmarks just like you would clean out your closet. It was a fairly tedious, unrewarding task. Then it was a snap to upload everything to Pinboard, and to reduce my browser-based bookmarks to just those I either wanted at my fingertips, or that I thought were too private to put in the cloud at all – like credit card and bank account access.

I’m thoroughly happy with the results! Searching is excellent. I keep a tab in my browser open all the time to Pinboard and it’s like having my own personal Google. It’s led me to bookmark more things and to be thorough about the tagging of my bookmarks in almost a compulsive way so they’re easy to find.

I’m still using Xmarks, but with a much reduced set of bookmarks so I can tell if anything disappears, or if my browser bookmarks seem to be getting corrupted in any way. I contacted Xmarks technical support about my missing 300 bookmarks and they’ve said that they’re going to see if they can help me recover them. These were lost over the period of 12 or more months, so it’s something of a treasure hunt. The way it happened were completely empty directories that were once full, so it’s not as much of a task as it sounds. By the way, I would mention in a positive way that I’m thoroughly thrilled with LastPass which is a companion product to Xmarks.

by