Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

EXACTLY!

Back in the days when "small pieces loosely joined" was a thing, I thought Delicious was very, very cool. (I use Diigo (free) now which is the closest I could find to Delicious when it went bad). I needed something that isn't account dependent and works on web and mobile, so matter where I am browsing content I can save a reference to it. Hypothesis looks interesting but imo is more geared to textual annotation than tagging.

Bookmarks are so bad, that they don't even keep your most recent bookmark in a folder at the top.

But what we lost when we lost Delicious was so much potential. For example...

* people were exploring using tag clouds semanticly, to sort of translate how two different people categorised things (you say "cool", they say "hot" etc)

* I think NASA did collaborative tagging where you merely tag interesting things to keep an eye on with nextYear, fiveYears or TenYears then produced a Horizon Report of the overlaps.

* People were making news readers that found interesting items based on your tag cloud and items adjacent to those tagged in your cloud.

* A tag cloud was a quick "Contents page" for any blog out there... You could glance at one and see if this content was for you.

* They were emergent, as in, they evolved over time - so much better than most peoples' idea of categories, or how categories are used in the real world.

I think that despite all the potential in bookmarking/tagging people weren't ready to pay for it - and if you're the kind of person who squirrels lots of things away for later, in a sensible manner, you're going to find a way to do it somehow.

But bookmarks/tags etc could be so much more.

for bookmarking articles, you have https://getpocket.com/ and https://www.instapaper.com/

"Social bookmarking" started with deli.co.us and has largely been subsumed by reddit.

Beyond some level of complexity, Evernote, Obsidian, Notion, etc become bookmarking tools

...but the ultimate place to find the bookmark managers are in the Chrome and Firefox extension stores:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/category...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/bookmark?_category...

There doesn't seem to be any money at all in this space, and any really groundbreaking innovation will be folded in by the browser vendors, so I don't expect there to be much more thwn what's already here.

I have run a linkblog for 15+ years now. It's basically bookmarks (and stored in Pinboard) but my focus is on publishing a social media feed for others to read. https://www.somebits.com/linkblog/

Linkblogging used to be a thing people did in the heydey of early 2000s blogging. Now it's mostly lost as a form. The spirit of it lives though in the way Mastodon, Slack, Facebook, etc make it easy to share a link and have a preview for it. What's missing is an archival backup view of that sharing. Pinboard gives me mine, but I seldom use it other than to search for something specific I vaguely remember.

Tools are not the main problem. What need to be “re-invented?” first is our personal approach to information overload.

One of the bigger issues with bookmarks is they always seem valuable the moment you add them, then that value somehow evaporates most of the time.

Between Bookmark-Hoarding and Zero-Bookmarks, thoughtful curation will always be an art form.

Del.icio.us re-invented bookmarks way back in 2003, and it lost popularity for a lot of reasons specific to it. But I think the reason there isn't another re-invention is because:

1) Browser sync became a thing, so your bookmarks are everywhere (del.icio.us let you access bookmarks through their site, but sync made that unnecessary for your personal devices)

2) Searching your personal synced browser history got a lot better using the "omnibox" (no need to create bookmarks to find a site you visited in the past, it's there in history -- and if it's not, it's probably easy to find it with Google)

3) Site "discovery" (remember StumbleUpon?) got replaced with social media newsfeeds and Reddit. People bookmarked and shared fun lists of sites in the early days of the internet, but now algorithmic feeds that learn your interests have taken off

I keep a list of bookmarks of 20-30 very specific URL's for certain pages on sites to skip navigating through the site, some special bookmarklets, etc. But that doesn't need much organization, and it's not for sharing. For everything else, there's the three things above.

I started converting my bookmarks to Raindrop.io and noticed the following:

- timeless recipes and instructions should rather be saved locally (pdf, mp4)

- research oriented links are better saved in a doc or kms for multi-device and person access.

- travel & outdoors oriented links are sometimes best saved in a map app (especially those allowing you to save notes like “Organic Maps”).

- tech “how-to” links are often not save-worthy when advice is/was easy to find, especially when tech or best practices change.

- organizing many links with folders is really frustrating when categories overlap and you end up duplicating links using extra url parameters (ex: abc.com/#1)

- most things I save only have tags. I use folders for things like account access, car, finance, and health where visible, quick access is important.

- organizing can become a chore and reason to procrastinate on much more of important things in life.

- Naming categories, folders is hard, and I wish Raindrop or other services used word2vec or other tools to improve indexing and search results in case keywords used are insufficient or slightly off

Bookmarks today are called browser tabs. People hoarde 100 open tabs with their most visited sites. Both Edge and chrome now support sleeping tabs which essentially turn your tab into a bookmark that loads from hibernation as soon as you open it.

I never found a solution to what I actually want/need:

- Snippet bookmarking. I don't want to browse to the whole page again, just highlight and save the piece of it I need to bookmark.

- Annotations. I want to highlight, underline, bold, and comment on what I've bookmarked so that I know why I bookmarked it or what I intended to remember later.

- In an open standard, like JSON, so that I can do things with the bookmarks other than view them in your proprietary website.

Seems like a fairly simple ask, but all the software that promises to do it fell short of my expectations.

For me, instead of bookmarks I would love to have optimised/nicely searchable browser history, and a bookmark as a way to mark more significant history pages.

It would be great to have AI suggest tags/categories, ability to snooze and recall at set times, and see when the site was last accessed.

I think bookmarks fail because they are buried away and not front and centre, and they mix the concepts of “notes for future reference” and “regularly visited favourite sites”.

Bookmarks mostly get implemented in the browser, and going for big market-share drives the UI and features toward targeting the lowest common denominator. Some people out there don't know the difference between facebook or google and the WWW itself.

I still use Firefox in part because the bookmark tagging and the awesomebar work marginally better than what Chrome does.

Browsers and web UI have gotten dumbed down since even the more power-user oriented days of Firefox and prevalence of RSS.

the only bookmarks i actually revisit with regularity are webpages that have some kind of tool on them (e.g. a BPM counter, a javascript minifier, etc).

otherwise, the rest of my bookmarks end up being generated when i'm on some random site, see something interesting on the page, think wow this is really great let me bookmark it, press Ctrl+D, and then never go back to the site ever again. which isn't all that bad.. there's something nice about the feeling of just seeing all of the titles of those sites (and remembering when you found all of those URLs) when you click the bookmark menu, and all of the titles show up. it feels lived-in, like an old house with history.

at some point, i decided an even better way of capturing bookmark-able moments was instead to take screenshots of something specific on the page, and collect them somewhere else, like on a blog. i dont need to go back to the actual page via a bookmark, because the image is enough.

for example, here's where i collect curious and/or spam-like findings, in lieu of a bookmark: https://jollo.org/LNT/bb/effexor1for1dogs/

Bookmarks was about curation and sync for most people. We had a great bookmarking service war during the early 2000s (delicious, et. al) and then when social media took over, everybody moved it to that. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and even on WhatsApp.

Most 'ordinary' users had bookmarks for various blogging platforms, recipes, etc, which has now largely moved to social media. Recipes on Instagram, micro-blogging on Facebook, Twitter, articles on any of them.

There's no need for dedicated bookmark services anymore when you can just search that platform. WhatsApp has a Links feature in there so you can just look up past links in conversations.

The rest of the needs have been taken care of by their respective browsers and sync service.

Web sites are more or less ephemeral, with many sites having a lifespan of ~2 years or less. This makes bookmarking less valuable.

The need has been mostly eliminated for many people with the ability to search.

DevonThink. You can store and organise not only bookmarks, but pdfs, web archives, rss feeds, notes and any other type of file. You can also highlight, annotate and search for connections all in the same place. Has completely changed how I interact with a computer.

I've started using the Arc browser as my daily browser and really like how it treats bookmarks as tabs. Basically, bookmarks and tabs are on the same visual level but separated by a divider.

Del.icio.us used to be really good. It's a shame they got acquired and shut down. I don't think there is anything that does a good job with bookmarking today.

The implementation of bookmarks in Firefox is very useful to me. No they're not organized into any sort of sensible taxonomy and I don't care. I bookmark any page I think I might want to return to in the future - and when that future date arrives, I start typing words I remember from it in my address bar.

Firefox is smart enough to recommend bookmarked sites as I type based on string matches to website titles and URLs - more often than not, that's enough and I find what I'm looking for.

I think this is a better way to find stuff on the web than a taxonomy, I think Google search won and Yahoo's directory lost for similar reasons, the web is just too vast and chaotic to make imposing a taxonomy practical. A taxonomy is more useful for understanding relationships between things than for finding a particular thing. But in this scenario I don't care what relationship the page I want to view has to other pages. I just want to find it as quickly as possible.

I have mild anxiety that someone who doesn't really understand the problem space or prior work will come along one day, try to "improve" this feature, and make it useless...

I’ve been loving https://mymind.com/, which brings a lot of new innovations to a product that’s more or less bookmarking.

It tries to do a lot of curation and organization automatically, and it does a very good job at resurfacing what I’m looking for, given that I just throw things in there with minimal hand-categorization effort.

Not exactly “reinventing” bookmarks. But I’ve been working on a micro SaaS[0] to send interesting articles, newsletters and RSS to Kindle. And it kinda “forces” me to actually read those articles, and not just send them into oblivion.

If you’re developing a reading habit in 2023, give it a try.

[0]: https://ktool.io

I don't know about anyone else, but "giant list of media to consume in the future" be they games, movies, books, or blog posts is antithetical to me actually eventually enjoying that media. The value of having a list of things that I thought might be interesting but not interesting enough to read immediately is basically zero.

Shiori is a self-hosted bookmark manager that uses tags and it's what I use now. https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

I've been strongly preferring methods that let me tag items and have a good search - either in addition to or instead of putting them in a folder. If I don't like the "taxonomy" I can just add more tags, instead of constantly trying to figure out the one folder where everything should go.

I can share by creating an additional visitor user, or use the import/export commands. I hope those get built into the UI sometime, but I rarely share more than a single bookmark at a time.

It is an extra step to copy/paste links into Shiori versus browser built-in features, but I prefer not to trust or rely on browsers for my bookmarks unless at work. Seems like everyone wants sync those to accounts without my explicit consent.

Yeah so the biggest problem with bookmarks is that they don't sync across devices very well, and a secondary problem is that you can't tag them or leave a note about why you care.

If something is ONLY relevant to me in a work context at my work web browser I will store it as a bookmark there.

If something is related to one of my broader life projects, like it makes me take a different perspective on that thing, then I take the time to open up Google Keep, write a blurb about my new perspective, link the article, and tag it accordingly.

I've been contemplating moving these to Obsidian so that the notes can be aggregated and cross-linked, but I am noticing friction where this defeats the abstract point of bookmarks where they are "dump and go". Probably I want to keep using Keep but then have periodic checkins where I move everything from Keep into Obsidian and delete it from Keep?

For myself, I’ve found FireFox’s syncing of bookmarks to work well enough across devices and platforms that I’ve created menu bar cascading folders of bookmarks to organize sites I frequently or semi-frequently visit. The Vimium add-in is a nice touch on the desktop as one only needs to type ‘b’ and the autocomplete will get one to the bookmarked website in few keystrokes, all without touching the mouse.

What I find still missing is a bookmarking service similar to Pocket, but with a local save option and well integrated annotation, tagging, and search functionality. This is of particular value when researching a topic or gathering references for a project. Zotero can provide some of this as it does save web pages, but is not ideal for all cases, especially more casual o exploratory data gathering. I’d appreciate any suggestions.

Because it's faster to Google something than to look for something in your bookmarks.

A few people will bookmark things. Even fewer of them will ever use those bookmarks. In most cases this will limited to a few sites with weird URLs that will often be for work and these will be on the prominent real estate just below your tabs on Chrome. Anything hidden behind a menu is strictly WORN (Write Once Read Never).

The act of organizing bookmarks in an exercise in building a hierarchical categorization, much like we had in the early Internet with the Yahoo directory and similar. These are never natural to use. The mental model is always imperfect and poorly remembered when you try to use it. It's the same reason "tagging" persists while "directories" don't.

I don’t personally like to save bookmarks of articles that are one-time read. And I hate to see them shown in what ends up being a messy browser navbar.

I couldn’t find anything that suited my needs so I just went ahead and created my app that simply enables me to save links, tag them and put them in a folder so I can organise them. It uses sqlite under the hood and you can even export it if you want to keep a copy of it. If you’re interested you can find the app (currently in beta testing, iOS only) at [0].

[0]: https://ulry.app

I've been looking for replacement for del.icio.us every so often. I believe Hypothes.is page notes may be the best web-based way to collaboratively bookmark the internet now. Though it is still convenient to use bookmarking features of pages/apps I consume content on (Feedly, Youtube, etc).

Ref https://web.hypothes.is/blog/varieties-of-hypothesis-annotat... .

I just use a Git repository with plain text (and some custom marking up) files, as my knowledge repository, that also includes copy-pastes of the important information that I found in the articles in question, thoughts etc.

My custom markup consists of:

- a number of '*' at the beginning of a line, for important things (more stars = more important; usually just 1 or 2, sometimes 3, if I'm super excited some more.)

- '#' for comments from me between copy-pasted text

- '[' .. ']' on separate lines to group things together, possibly nested (Emacs allows me to easily jump over them, and down or up nested groups).

- '-' on a line between a copy-pasted comment and its reply; '- -' on a line between two comments (or sub-threads grouped with '['..']') on the same level.

- '\SOME_UPCASED_CATEGORY_NAME' for marking something as belonging to that category

I'm organizing the files into a hierarchy of folders. In case of ambiguity, I use symlinks.

I've written a number of tools to handle such a repository well (search names by regex, search names and content by regex, cd into a directory matching a regex, etc.), currently mostly written in Perl[1]. I've recently started using Rust and will probably move those over to Rust over time. One tool I still want to write is for automatically updating symlinks when they break, by looking up moves in the Git history; I'll definitely write that one in Rust.

It's got more than 17K entries now (including symlinks) after 7 years. The size of the .git folder after `git gc` is 51 MB. I synchronize it (simply via Git) between various machines. I use it to find information again pretty regularly. Even though I call the repository "bookmarks", I'm now also tracking projects in it (ideas, plans, sources etc.), as well as job postings and my handling of them.

So the only bookmarks I keep in the browsers are for pages that I use regularly.

[1] in my big pile of scripts, currently not well grouped for consumption: https://github.com/pflanze/chj-bin

Pocket, Collections and reading list fit this description. Really though, it’s just not the way many people think. We don’t navigate rigid taxonomies in order to remember things. Given an excess of available information, a loose semantic connection to a given website is all you really need to know how to get back there (or at least to find similar information again via another search) at a later date.

Also - make use of your address bar’s search functionality. Bookmarking as implemented is still useful.

Seems like something a librarian might enjoy though heh.

The only time I need to save a website it's in the context of some notes, I prefer to cut and paste the exact url into my notes. Bookmarks without context aren't that useful otherwise.

I've used the Collections[1] feature in Edge for this. It essentially acts as a one level deep folder where you can store links and text notes related to a subject. It also has built-in support for sharing.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not in Edge.

[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/organize-...

If something is particularly interesting I just post the link to HN :^)

Safari Tab Groups are cool, also there is Toby, a tab grouping extension for chrome. Both sync across devices.

Seems like a small change, but for me a true and very productive reinvention of bookmarks.

Bookmarks, like email, don't really need to be reinvented IMHO, they work just fine. If you don't organize them well or don't use them, that's your problem.

I organized my sources into a simple RSS reader I visit daily: https://altneu.me/rtr/

My covid side project was attempting to find a solution in this space. I envisioned users publishing their bookmarks in related forums (not unlike subreddits). The differentiating factor was allowing forum owners to monetize (as opposed to the platform appropriating all revenue). After thing reopened I got busy readjusting, but I plan to revive the efforts starting Jan: https://discoflip.com

My bookmarks now are my browser's history and search results But I gess there is Pocket, I used it for a bit as method to mark site from phone to look at on desktop

My tabs are mostly related to a current project, or topic - I find Opera's workspaces are great for this. But I use firefox. I've written a slightly cumbersome but necessary cli tool to extract tabs from the session file and add project or topic tags, then open a filtered list in a window. I find this preferable to all the firefox workflows I've tried. All I wanted for christmas was firefox workspaces.

They have, its called having 400 hibernated Tabs open :)

IME: Link rot. When your URLs aren’t valid for more than a few weeks, there’s no reason to keep them; it’s easier to search (not that search is always reliable over time either).

Any reinvention would have to incorporate search and keep track of sufficient content from the page to do a search for its new location. Either that or link to 3rd party content storage (i.e. archive.org et.al.)

I've hidden the bookmarks bar to avoid the temptation to organize my bookmarks. I still make bookmarks, but only because they show up in the address bar when I search for them. I think social media (including github) has mostly replaced the social, collaborative aspect of bookmarking.

I love Toby. Makes it easy to organize my bookmarks, and also view them at any time because I have them all under different categories (for example: Daily, Programming, Games, Banking, etc.)

https://www.gettoby.com/

I generally tried to bookmark the most commonly visited websites so I can access it instantly.

Overtime, I stopped using it because if I write a keyword associated with the website - if it's either in title tag or in the url, chrome automatically shows that link on the top.. this has been so good.

Here's what I'm going to try instead - beyond URLs:

  Ask HN: Full-text browser history search forever?
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30696451

I.e. store the full text content of the websites I visit, and easily search it.

About ten years ago I switched to saving pages as PDF into my dropbox folder. Works a charm and on my Mac spotlight search works with it remarkably well. I still use browser's bookmarks bar for sites I use frequently but I deleted all the other bookmarks.

In Safari at least, bookmarks appear as results in the search bar so the fact that they are unorganized is mostly irrelevant. That said, I only bookmark things that a web search doesn't easily return, which is a small set of things.

URL’s stopped being canonical

Well there’s always Pinboard. I think the problem is there’s not much money in it unless you go the route of a social network or advertising/leadgen site.

Not sure why bookmarks should be separate from your knowledgebase otherwise. Why not use Notion clipper and a database in notion for maximum flexibility?

back in 2010-ish we had social bookmarks like delicio.us, which was actually pretty cool and useful, I still wonder if a kind of search engine could be built on top of that kind of thing, basically a recommendation system for websites weighted more for quality than search term matching.

One effect of the massive complexity of web standards is lack of innovation and competition in the browser space.

Bookmarks don’t seem cool so product teams don’t spend time trying to reimagine them

I use tags and then the * character in the address bar to search my bookmarks.

I made a page on my personal website that shows unread bookmarks. I can add bookmarks by text message or bookmarklet in a browser. Check a box once I've read it to remove it from the list.

web consumption kinda shifted into social media, most of the www is now consumed in smartphones, inside social media apps.

pinboard.in & raindrop.io ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

History can be searched.