End of the Road for Xmarks

Man, I'm gutted. I use Xmarks every day to sync from my work &#38; windows machines (Firefox) to my MacBook (Safari) and thus to my iPhone / iPad. I'd have happily paid $5 a month or so to use Xmarks and I imagine I'm not alone.<p>It's really unfortunate that they won't even try the freemium, or (shock!) even the outright pay to play approach. I'm sure with two million users there would have been enough paying customers to create a profitable business.

<i>with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free</i><p>After taking so many knocks, it's easy to be disheartened. But why not at least give this a go? It doesn't involve a large engineering investment - just charge for what you already offer! When the alternative is shutting down, where existing users need to move on anyway, you might as well. Those users might appreciate the value of what they have now that it is about to disappear...

They are failing because they can't even <i>ask</i> people to pay for their service. They skipped that and went directly to we are shutting down our servers in 90 days.<p>DHH needs to give them some scream therapy about business models. The one he does about asking your customers to pay for your service.

2m users * 1% conversion rate * $10/yr = $100k = probably not enough for a VC-backed startup.<p>My suspicion is that because users just used the browser's internal bookmarks they couldn't easily add affordances that would draw attention, leaving no surface on which to advertise. I guess this is one advantage that delicious had, although breaking the bookmarking paradigm to do so was very painful in other ways.<p>I no longer believe startups who claim their value proposition is "the data will be really valuable someday."

Chrome killed my use of Xmarks. With a consistent, cross-platform browser that has syncing out-of-the-box I no longer need Xmarks. I mainly use other browsers for testing now.

My experience with Xmarks was not a great one. I used it when it was first called Foxmarks and enjoyed it. Some time after the name change, I noticed that one of the updates had turned on by default some extra overlays on the google search results page touting their rankings.<p>The blog post suggests that this was a bonus feature, or a value-add, but that's not how I saw it. A previously well-behaved bookmarks sync plugin all of a sudden decided to impose on my preferred search engine. That's a spammy low-class intrusion into my browsing experience.<p>I turned off the feature, but every time I updated the plugin thereafter it was turned back on by default. I jumped ship as soon as Chrome presented a viable alternative.

"For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service."<p>Not a bad hypothesis, one I see regularly but 90 days to close sure illustrates the downside and value of searching for that monetization model earlier rather than later.

I really hate to see Xmarks shutdown. Been a happy user.<p>For not going the charging user route, could it be that they took some rounds of funding and expanded their company structure and infrastructure greatly to the point that it couldn't be sustained without a huge success? They expanded into the search and other stuff besides bookmark sync'ing. Those are the ones that don't pan out and dragging down the whole company.<p>Instead of shutting down everything, it would be better to keep the bookmark sync part and dump the rest, and start charging users. Not sure whether the investors would go for the low return route.

It's always sad when someone's dreams are shattered. But what I don't get is why a bookmark syncing service needs venture capital, employees, a CEO and whatnot. There may not be a business model that supports all that, but there may be a business model that pays for the labor actually required to provide a syncing service.<p>In a way this is like shutting down all the cafes that failed to become Starbucks.

Are there any other sync services that work across both Firefox and Chrome?

I, for one, am extremely disappointed to hear this news. I use Xmarks extensively on chrome and firefox across 3 computers. It is so easy to setup and use. I've never managed to get the Chrome sync working as it always hangs up and never finishes setting up.<p>I think I'd have paid for Xmarks as a service.

<i>Wow, xmarks is dead because they couldn't "find a scalable business model" with two million users.</i><p><a href="http://twitter.com/PinboardIN/status/25734453850" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/PinboardIN/status/25734453850</a>

From "build something people want" to "built something people want" to "can't monetize 2 million users."<p>Any other examples of this?

sucks to have this ending after all your efforts. Xmarks was a great product. Hats off to you and your team and good luck in your next adventure.

Does anyone else find it odd that two million active users is "not enough users". Most startups would kill for that.

I find it strange that there are no buyers interested in your user base. I'd love to hear more about the monetization efforts that you attempted, as I would have imagined there should be numerous ways to leverage those users. But, of course, if I was an expert, I'd probably have the capital to make an offer.

Sorry to see them go. I've been using their extension in Firefox since the beginning and it has always performed exceptionally well while synchronizing thousands of bookmarks.

Huh. I was actually looking for a Chrome bookmark sync for my iPhone two or three weeks ago and I came across Xmarks. I didn't choose it because I was really hoping for a standalone app that would interface with Chrome's built-in bookmark sync. While it's sad to see any popular software company shutter its doors, since it is going away (in a comparatively short 90 days, no less) I'm personally glad I didn't start using it.

Sad to see them go, but this might be a good lesson for several people out there who go into startups with the "make product now, worry about revenue model later" mentality. While that can be successful in many cases, there is a downside as well where many businesses don't survive.<p>Either way, I'll miss xmarks since I use it on all my computers and my phone :( Thanks for the great product for the last several years.

They might've been doing this already with their Google search enhancements, but why don't they make their free version of the extension hijack (in a very open way to the user) Google queries and insert their own affiliate id so that they get the credit? Seems like an unobtrusive enough way to finance a free product, though it might step on Mozilla's toes.

I use the Xmarks firefox plugin, but with my own server. It's always supported that. I expect that'll keep working for a while until a newer Firefox breaks the plugin, so I'm still in the same boat of needing to find another sync method. But I might have longer than people who use the service. Or shorter, no way to tell, really.

I can't believe a team with so many users hasn't began charging them and when things get rough they want to shut down instead of charging because they think users will not pay?<p>Two million users? Sorry but they know nothing about business and it's worse for the ones who backed them... How on earth they're going to let this go this way?

I used Foxmarks for a long while when I was using Firefox, until Google Browser Sync came along, which has also passed. It was a great idea at the time. In its modern iteration, however, I felt like the best part about it was the inter-browser interoperability. I used it more recently for a time when I was still mostly using Chrome and then Firefox on some machines (such as BSD boxes).<p>All of the newer browser sync options that I am aware of are in a convenient location--built into the browser. Opera, Chrome, Firefox, et all are all getting bookmark sync options. However, I would much like to see a way to sync easily between the different browsers again. This is what made XMarks useful once it evolved past being only for Firefox. For now, I'm using all Opera, partially so I can keep everything together including my mobile devices.

Oops. I just switched to Xmarks after Chrome's sync ate a chunk of my bookmarks because of a version mismatch.

Lessons learned:<p>1. Adding a feature to someone else's product is a risky business model. If it's popular, the product-maker will implement your feature, at which point your goose is cooked.<p>2. Adding a free feature to someone else's free product isn't even risky. It is among the surest methods of losing money.<p>3. Know when to sell. The missed opportunity here was search. With their data and methods, Xmarks was able to improve query results for a predictable fraction of searches. At this point (2008), they should have sold to one of the up-and-coming search engines -- Windows Live or Ask.

"Looking for the list of all auto manufacturers? Or presidential libraries? Or art supply sites? A casual comparison of our results with those of the major search engines would convince you that we were on to something. We recruited a group of non-technical subjects to do a usability test, and it flopped. Sit people in front of a search box and ask them to test it, and their first query is their own name. #FAIL."<p>Why did they assume their primary market was going to be non-technical people? Why not build some thing like stumbleupon of 100 Million bookmarks.

Nobody's mentioned this yet, so: this is particularly notable because it's "Mitch Kapor's startup" (famous for Lotus 1-2-3). Used to be called Foxmarks.

I hope they could open source their code or their sync protocol, or at least release a guide how to setup thirdparty sync servers.

On an opportunistic note, I do wish they'd everyone access to their "1 billion bookmark corpus", in anonymized form of course.

Aren't there several YC companies who do searches of browsing history?<p>At the moment I rely on Firefox awesome bar, but I have a nagging feeling that it is not reliable (keep not finding sites I was sure I had bookmarked). So a better way to search and organize bookmarks is still being called for.<p>I can't imagine that there isn't a market for better bookmarking...

Todd, will you open-source any code?

Our newly launched service Zukmo is a good alternative for Xmarks.<p>I just posted a request for it to be reviewed (under Ask HN): <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735218" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735218</a>

I'm afraid to go back to Google for bookmark syncing because the last time Google offered the service they shut it down. That's how I got to X/FoxMarks in the first place.

I would pay for Xmarks.

xMarks has an amazing set of data. A set of tagged bookmarks on a large enough scale is essentially like running mechanical turk (with 2,000,000 users) on the entire internet (better yet, only bookmark-worthy parts of the internet), and asking it to "describe this page in 10 words or less". The results, I think, are the most accurate description of URLs you could get on such a large scale. Essentially every site that has over a certain amount of bookmarks is <i>guaranteed</i> to be of high quality and very relevant to what it's been tagged as. (The only problem is when sites change, domains expire, etc).<p>When I was making MoreOf.It, I scouted the competition in depth. The only one that stood out was xMarks, and similarity search wasn't even their main gig. They understand the richness of bookmarking data. They've separated URLs into categories, and have the highest ranking sites in those categories. They also nailed similarity pretty well. I might even say their results are better than mine, because they have a much larger index of sites.<p>Two and a half years ago, when I first built a prototype of similarity search, there were hardly <i>any</i> meta-websites. Besides Quantcast and their ilk, and bookmarking websites, and maybe a couple of bullshit "site worth calculators" (which just multiply site traffic by an estimated CPM), there was hardly anything happening in the meta-site space. Now, there are tons more services that cater to people Gooling an actual url or site name. To name a few, CrunchBase, AboutUs.org, BackType, UberVU, SimilarSites, SitesLike, and sites that aggregate results from these (QuarkBase). "Meta" is blossoming, and it seems like xMarks could take advantage of this with their rich dataset.<p>For example, as someone told me I should do, they could sell analytics information to websites about their competitors. If you're ZipCar.com, for example, you would pay to know the following: How have people described zipcar.com in the last (x amount of time), and what are the trends of those tags? How is my popularity vs. an automatically generated list of my competitors [ala: similar sites]. Which competitors are trending, and with which tags? Any new competitors that are breaking through the ranks? Some information could give cues to alter your business: What types of tags are related to my business are trending right now (i.e.: perhaps "bike share" is becoming more and more popular. I think that's valuable information. And, like an arms dealer, you can deal to both sides of competition. With 2,000,000 users organizing this set of data (for their own benefit of course), it's pretty confident sample size and it's win-win for everyone.<p>Frankly, I don't understand what benefits "synchronizing" offers. Why not just store your bookmarks on any number of bookmarking websites (Delicious, Google, etc), and then log-in to that website from whatever browser/computer/device you want? I do, however, see value in the analytics of what people bookmark, and how they bookmark it.

Excellent service. I have been using xmarks for a while.

I never used them because there are plenty of <i>intranet</i> related bookmarks that I wouldn't want appearing on a search engine. This service could have lead to some nasty data breaches. It's probably better for the internet in general if they fade away.<p>Having said that, it sucks that they ran a popular service that they couldn't monetize.

That sucks. How do I synchronize my passwords with Chrome now?

In my fantasy world, Marco Arment would buy Xmarks and combine it with Instapaper. I'm sad to see Xmarks disappear without any viable alternative. I'd gladly pay $15-20 per year if that's what it took, but I imagine it could be even cheaper since cloud storage is so cheap: <a href="http://www.nasuni.com/news/nasuni-blog/whats-the-cost-of-a-gb-in-the-cloud/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nasuni.com/news/nasuni-blog/whats-the-cost-of-a-g...</a>