I’ve always found bookmarks in web browsers a little frustrating. I use quite a few different machines, and bookmarks, out of the box, are not shared across them. This leads to me inevitably wanting to remember a bookmark on one machine when it’s stored on another.
Del.icio.us is an interesting little experiment in social networking and bookmarking, but I’ve always found it a little frustrating. Having to load up the del.icio.us page whenever I want to create a bookmark is too much of a context-switch, so I’ve never really bothered with it.
Both of these frustrations are now solved for me with the new Del.icio.us bookmarks Firefox extension. This Firefox plugin replaces the default bookmark behaviour in Firefox with that of using your own Del.icio.us bookmarks instead. Install it on 2 machines et voila – centralized bookmark management. I’m now using this for all my bookmarks, including ones I only use for internal sites at work. For these links I just tag them ‘work:internal’ and don’t share them. I add this tag to my ‘favourite tags’ for quick reference.
Since the extension replaces the normal bookmark behaviour completely, adding a new bookmark is as simple as ‘Ctrl+D’ (sorry, Apple-D, still getting used to thinking in Applespeak,) so the context switch of using del.icio.us is also gone.
Yahoo own del.icio.us now, so I’m pretty confident my bookmarks will be around a while. The only shock is that I’m using a Yahoo, rather than Google, service for a change.
I’m not particularly using the ‘shared bookmarks’ feature yet, I’m really just using it for my own use at the moment, but I’ll see how things go.
If you’re so inclined you can browse my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/mike.b.roberts/ or grab my bookmark feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/mike.b.roberts/
Mike Roberts 