I was shocked to receive an email from XMarks today, announcing its own demise. They’re open to ideas to keep the business alive, but barring a new solution, it will cease to operate on January 10, 2011. If you have more questions about the shutdown, see their shutdown FAQ.
I’ve looked at the alternatives and I’m not encouraged.
I use Linkman Pro for the heavy lifting of my bookmarks management. It manages over 12,000 bookmarks that I can search instantly, but I still have custom searches, shortcuts and bookmarklets in the browser. They make browsing so much faster it’s second nature, but I’d rather have my eye poked with a cattle prod than to keep all the bookmarks in multiple browsers on multiple machines in sync.
As syncing has grown more popular, each browser has created their own method of syncing. There’s Firefox Sync, Chrome Sync and Opera Link, but none of these work on other browsers.
The folks at XMarks have been eminently professional in handling this shutdown, in addition to providing a quality service since the early Foxmarks days. If they do shut their doors in January, they’ll be sorely missed.
Update: They’re not dead yet. Their latest post has some financial details and you can pledge your support of $10-$20/year to keep them alive.
An Englishman in France (I think I’ve gathered) who works on TweetDeck also bemoaned the demise of xmarks on Twitter today: @richardbarley: V sad to see XMarks closing down. I rely heavily on it to keep all my devices in sync, and Chrome/Google sync have never worked well 4 me. :(
I’ve never used it myself, but it sounds like it would be handy; I suppose I won’t start now.
Wow. I hadn’t heard the bad news and I use Xmarks quite a bit. I also got a notice today that bloglines – the RSS reader I use, is shutting down in November.
@Cameron Yup, Xmarks and Bloglines users are both left searching, but at least Bloglines users have a solid replacement in Google Reader. I know of no other cross-browser bookmark syncing solution.
@DaveH I have a feeling they might find a way to keep it going. We’ll see.