Alternate Take:
- Bookmarking is not broken. Bookmarking works just fine.<p>What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do.<p>We don't know why we really make those bookmarks.<p>Bookmarking is not broken. We are.
The other idea / product that has been beaten to death would be note taking, todo lists, and similar... illusory productivity tools. I say illusory because writing down notes and tasks feels like you're being productive, but they really aren't.<p>I think these are really popular to be built because they are simple in terms of technology. Most early developers can fit the concept of a todo list in their head - it's what a lot of examples are made of.<p>And once that technical thing is solved, the emphasis is on design.
I pay for Pinboard. I have 5K bookmarks and daily add about 1-10 new ones. I will never read most of them. But when push comes to shove, I can easily find that BioTech article that generated a lot of discussion on HN because I tagged it as "hn" and "biotech". And if that article disappears from the web, Pinboard should still have a cached version. So now I can bookmark an article close tab #231 and fall asleep peacefully.
My theory: the larger your bookmark collection grows, the more indistinguishable it becomes from Google. It basically becomes a curated search index. The closest I have come to using bookmarks is through Firefox address bar suggestions from my browsing history.
The problem with bookmarking overall is that it's very easy to click a button to save it for later, but very little of it ends up actually being read. It's basically a nice-to-have list, if there were infinite time and we had infinite energy. But we have neither, so we end up developing personal folder systems or installing extensions or utilizing SaaS, all in the hope that the links won't be dead by the time we can actually read them.<p>The lack of adoption for paid services (and lack of development for better in-browser functionality) is just our acceptance and recognition that the things we bookmark don't really matter. Any site that matters to you, you'll remember. Any site that you forget about but may need to bring up later, you can just as easily google for. And anything else is generally irrelevant or accepted as ephemeral, even if slightly stimulating.
Could it be that bookmarking is something people often think they need, but actually, even if they remember to bookmark something they will rarely revisit their bookmarks.<p>What people really need is a way of recalling instantly every snippet of information from every website they have ever visited on any device in a timely fashion. Which sounds tricky to implement.
100% agree that bookmarks need a better solution. Whoever does it will change the game.<p>I'm a bookmarks hoarder. If I encounter a useful site, I bookmark it.<p>I have about 20,000 bookmarks on Chrome now.<p>Someone on HN once described bookmarks as a "knowledge graph". That's an apt description for what they do for me.<p>I've long given-up trying to neatly organize my bookmarks in folders. Now I use lots of keywords (as pseudo-tags) while saving a bookmark, with the hope that I'll be able to use the correct keywords later when looking for the bookmark.<p>I would, however, like save them neatly in folders.<p>In case someone from the Chrome team is reading this, some features that would really change the game for us bookmark hoarders are:<p>1. bookmarks search: allow us to search exclusively within a folder.<p>2. bookmarks search: option to search only folder names.<p>3. when saving a bookmark, give us a search box we can use to search folder names, and then quickly identify and pick a folder to save the bookmark in.<p>4. tags for bookmark (similar to tags in Gmail).
A very interesting solution that has worked for me is...Zotero.<p>Zotero + the web connector basically allows me to do a lot of things that are usually only achieved with paid products. For example, full text search, saving HTML copies offline, linking related websites, adding tags and notes, all of this (and more) is possible.
He states that bookmarks in browsers are "broken" but doesn't elaborate. I've never felt this way, Anyone know what he's talking about?
Idea* that has been beaten to death :)<p>From a consumer perspective, a product has to be 10x better for me to pay for it. There’s simply no way to make a bookmarking app that’s 10x better - there’s just not that much room for improvement.
Isn't bookmarking == hoarding? Somehow I have the feeling that sure, maybe one day that niche bookmarked piece of information will be useful (or fun), but it gets buried by many other useless bits, so there's a chance it'll never be actually used.<p>So no thanks, I don't want to pay to rent an extra organisational unit, and feed my obsession.
The problem with bookmarking applications is that aside from a few websites you visit regularly, browsing and searching your bookmarks isn't going to be substantially different from browsing and searching the web, so you can just as well do the latter. If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we're at it). Whatever you come up in terms of search, however, has to directly compete with the quality of Google's search engine.
Bookmarks projects fail to be interesting because simply recording a list of links (maybe with folders or tags or some other categorization method) is something anyone can do trivially in a text file. They add no value because they only focus on the easiest part - simply capturing the link. My bookmarks.txt file is just as easy to use and requires only a text editor. I can sync it multiple computers, organize and search it any way I want, back it up, add notes, etc. In many ways a text file is a vast improvement over the existing solutions.<p>If you really want to make a good bookmark app, you need to understand that the act of bookmarking, organizing bookmarks, and using bookmarks are three completely separate activities. When you create a bookmark, you want minimal interaction - click the star, maybe add a tag, and move on. When you're organizing bookmarks you want to review and restructure what you've already bookmarked into folders, a mindmap, etc. while taking into account the content behind each link. When you're using bookmarks, you want to leverage that existing organization scheme to find what you want quickly. Most bookmark features/plugins are decent at the first step of capturing the link, but are terrible at or completely ignore the rest.<p>I would love to see a bookmark app that was designed in the spirit of "Getting Things Done" - where ideas are captured quickly but then funneled into a system where they are later reviewed regularly and acted upon. Just capturing a list of bookmarks and regurgitating them to the user is not sufficient and can be easily replaced with a text file.
I agree with the last point.<p>> Finally there is no problem to be solved in the first place. And everyone is creating a solution in search of a problem.<p>Personally I stopped using bookmarks except for something temporary that I use multiple times a day for a short period of time (e.g. work related notes, designs etc). The more general purpose solution is, well, Google because at the end of the day you will have a huge bookmark list that you will have to search through anyway.
> Bookmarking is broken in all browsers<p>The author suggests bookmarking is broken in all browsers.
I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome.
I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar.
If I have to click on the >> arrows to expand I might just as well Google it.
So yes my simpler guess is that browsers bookmarking is indeed good enough.
Competitors to any bookmarking product include: social media / Reddit / HN, messaging / Slack, and of course Google.<p>I used Google to find an old tweet of mine to get a link to an old product today. It was very easy.<p>Any specific bookmarking app adds an extra step to any URL you would record on any other website in its context. So the solution is basically amounts to organizing uncontextualized URLs (hard to remember anyways) or make a somewhat useless record when there's a more contextualized record elsewhere.<p>A better tool would be something which captures URLs in their context. Like dated list of HN posts/comments I upvoted. Dated list of interactions with Jira. Etc.<p>Same thing with Spotify Liked Songs. That's basically bookmarks for songs. It's just A) better integration and B) social-it is it's own contextualization.
Local approach is a personal wiki; just drag the page to be 'bookmarked' into a relevant page on the wiki (or just a '/tmp' page for later sorting). I generally add the page title as the link name, makes for easy searching later. For example, I'd file this story as:-<p><pre><code> * [https://ruky.me/2022/02/01/ideas-that-have-been-beaten-to-death/ Ideas that been beaten to death] (ruky.me)
** [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166357 HN discussion (2022)]
</code></pre>
This shows up as a list of link in the wiki output:-<p><pre><code> * [Ideas that been beaten to death] (ruky.me)
* [HN discussion (2022)]
</code></pre>
The link for HN comments is so often used I've got it in a dedicated F key :)
Guilty as charged! I'm building my own 'unique' take on bookmarks[0] (really it is unique ;-) .<p>I think the reason this comes up is that people have more and more stuff to keep track of, and more and more of peoples stuff is accessed in a browser. Not so long ago there were standalone apps for email, word processing, spreadsheets, group chat, bug tracking, CRM etc etc. Now all of that stuff is inside some web app I get to in Chrome - me all all the other billion+ knowledge workers using Chromium. Thats why everyone has 50 tabs open at any given time.<p>When almost everything I want to track has a unique URL it opens up possibilities and the browser builders have not been keeping pace.<p>[0] <a href="https://braintool.org" rel="nofollow">https://braintool.org</a>
I've tried many products and approaches – until I landed on <a href="https://raindrop.io" rel="nofollow">https://raindrop.io</a>.<p>That's my favorite tool now for capturing videos, bookmarks, articles, etc content.<p>Totally worth the price - especially due to the permanent copies. There have been multiple times where the content disappeared from online shortly after I found it, but since Raindrop.io had a backup, I got to read it still.<p>My closing words: Stop searching for the best manager and make Raindrop.io your new friend :)<p>DISCLAIMER: I'm in no way connected to the service nor will I receive anything for endorsing it. I'm just a really happy customer.
I don't know about everyone else, but I usually bookmark to read later. I built a simple bookmarking webapp for this while in university over 10 years ago, pre-Pocket, even.<p>The thing is, I usually don't read it later.<p>Next time you bookmark something to read later, or send it to yourself, or whatever you do - maybe stop and ask: am I actually ever going to open this again?<p>Chances are you're reading articles to procrastinate, and if it's too long or not interesting enough to read even then, bookmarking it is just procrastinating on the procrastination.
I feel like an outlier in that I find bookmarks extremely useful. When I start a new project, I create a bookmark folder related to that project. I bookmark any web references I looked at during the course of that project. Then later I can remember "Oh yeah I did something like this in X project." and go peruse those bookmarks. I actually find it pretty fun to go back to old project folders and checkout what kind of stuff I bookmarked in the past.
I feel that the solution to this would be some kind of generic online storage solution. Like Excel, but for the whole web, where you can put any kind of data in, get an address (a web-ified pointer) to it, and be sure that you can look it up again at any time, from anywhere, using the address key.<p>A generic online storage system with Excel-like properties.<p>If that existed, then people would use it for bookmarks, and probably also for a host of other types of online storage needs.
As someone who has created a bookmarking app tailored to my needs only (and used only by me apparently), i m not sure i agree with the spirit<p>And the author seems to forget about pinterest
Oh I’ve been building one! But mine is truly different™, basically I gave up the idea of organizing bookmarks, in favor of searching them instead, building your personal search engine<p>In fact I’ve been blogging about it as I build it <a href="https://omnindex.substack.com/" rel="nofollow">https://omnindex.substack.com/</a>
I pay for Pocket, it's been my main bookmarking tool for years ever since Feedly got too intricate for my needs. I was a founding member of Feedly when Google Reader went down but it got too many features and too complicated for my taste.
Well you could say the same about todo lists. Yet a lot of people make money with todo lists.<p>I am sure there are some people making money with bookmarking somewhere…
So basically I tried to solve the 'Bookmark Problem' by creating a simple user focused search engine, user builds a list of bookmarks, and the app, Mrkff, allows you to search your bookmarks as if it were google, but tailored to your own content.<p>If you would allow me to plug my own personal bookmarking app - Mrkff [0] - pronounced `Mark off`. I went through YC in 2019 for it, and I launched it in 2020.<p>I also built a cross-platform web-extension for it too using a small framework (Desolate-Zero) I made for the web extensions to make use of all the features of both chrome and firefox. It just a simple click extension and click bookmark and the server takes care of the rest.<p>Basically I opted to make a full-text searchable version of every webpage I bookmark. A copy is also stored on the server, I intended to paywall downloading the actual webpage text, but make it searchable in the free version. This way I can search for obscure words or phrases that were on the webpage that I remembered while not remembering the actual webpage. I had an auto tag system on it too derived from the actual text of the web page. V2 is set to expand from text to video, pdf, audio etc.<p>I had a lot of fun with it, but this version is lacking in certain aspects, and I've spent the last 6 months working on version 2 of this app. I certainly didn't know how widespread this type of app was to be honest. But I use my solution on the daily, so I'll probably continue working on it.<p>[0] - <a href="https://mrkff.com" rel="nofollow">https://mrkff.com</a>