You have an extensive collection of bookmarks (or "favorites") in your browser for the sites that you visit. You become so accustomed to using them that you don't even know the URLs of some of the sites you enjoy. Then one day you're using another computer, and you feel lost. Your bookmarks aren't there, and you can't operate without them. What can you do?
This is the kind of problem people are encountering more and more as computing becomes a commodity. The idea of having one personal computer where you keep all of your data is becoming less tenable. You need some way of storing data so that no matter what computer you're using, your data is accessible. The answer is to store data on a server; the problem is, servers are mostly designed for businesses these days, and typically only geeks put time and money into having a server at home.
The good news is that for small needs like centrally storing your bookmarks, you can use servers on the Internet. For example, Google Bookmarks and Windows Live Favorites are two free services that allow you to store your bookmarks on an Internet server so you can access them from any Internet-connected computer. Neither service provides quite the same quickness and convenience of your browser's built-in Favorites or Bookmarks feature, but they offer important functionality that today's browsers can't deliver.
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3 comments:
While Google Bookmarks and the such are alright, there's a couple of other services I'd also recommend:
Delicious: http://del.icio.us/ -- They pioneered the whole tagging thing that's popular on the Internet today. The interface is rather bare, but being able to tag bookmarks makes them easier to recall later, usually.
Foxmarks: http://www.foxmarks.com/ -- If you use Firefox, this is a great way to keep bookmarks synced. You get the convenience of using Firefox's bookmark management, but with an online backup/access/storage system too.
There's also Google's Browser Sync for Firefox, which can sync not just bookmarks, but cookies, passwords, and pretty much everything you need to preserve your full sessions from machine to machine. You can turn on and off the pieces you want saved, which is also quite nice.
I'd lean to Foxmarks at this point, personally -- it saves what I need and nothing else, and it just works. :)
Thanks for the additions, Brian. I've heard of del.icio.us, but I admit I haven't tried it. Hadn't heard of the other two at all.
I'm not in love with Google Bookmarks; I've wanted something that integrates with the browser's Favorites function. Sounds like I could get that with some Firefox extensions. But Firefox is still my secondary browser; do you know of anything that provides this synchronization functionality in IE?
My Hello Kitty bookmark seems to do fine. It beats dog-earring the pages.
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