macdobhran: FFZ (FFZ)
[personal profile] macdobhran

So the big news yesterday was that Yahoo is shutting down the social bookmarking website Del.icio.us. This news is based off a leaked internal document regarding plans for sundowning several of Yahoo’s products. Unfortunately the news is true. However, no date has been announced as to when the service will be shut down.

I was a late comer to social bookmarking and even now I don’t really use it socially. I started using Delicious about 2 years ago when my harddrive crashed and (naturally) I didn’t have a good back up so I lost all my bookmarks. I figured this new fangled thing called social bookmarking would keep that from happening again.

As I got more familiar with using tags instead of folders for bookmarking I learned to truly love the concept. With traditional bookmarks every time I bookmarked a website, I would put it in a folder. However by using tags to bookmark a website I could now assign that Washington Post webpage about Sarah Palin’s latest political buffoonery at least four tags: palin, politics, dumbass, and WTF?!; instead of sticking it in a folder and trying to remember if I put it in the Political folder or the Stupid Shit folder. So last night I started my hunt for a new bookmarking solution. Since I prefer to use Firefox for a browser, I started there.

Enter Firefox Synch. Synch is a Firefox add on tool that will synchronize your Firefox bookmarks, tabs, preferences, history, and passwords across multiple installations of Firefox. Basically once you install the add on and create an account all that information is synchronized with a Firefox server. Then when you go to one of your other computers or even your mobile device (if you use a Firefox browser on it) you can again install the add on, enter your email address and password, and voilĂ , all your bookmarks are pulled from the Firefox server and synchronized with your current browser. This would also save you from exporting/importing all your bookmarks if you got a new computer. Just install both Firefox and the Synch add on, let them do their thing and you’re all set.

This will work best when you have a dedicated login to both computers. Meaning, this wouldn’t be a good thing to implement on a public computer, like in a library. The other downside is that if you are forced to use a different browser, say Internet Exploder at work, then obviously a Firefox plugin isn’t going to be the best option for you. Cross-browser and multiple machine support was where Delicious really shined.

This weekend I’ll spend some time going through the hundreds of bookmarks I’ve saved and pulling down the ones I want to keep into Firefox. I’m looking at is as “end of year housekeeping”.

So, R.I.P. Del.icio.us, you will be missed.



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