Out with bookmarks, in with contacts

Does anyone find bookmarks useful any more? Sure, a handful in the Safari / Firefox [recent IE?] "quick links" bar, but beyond that? 


I've got -- yikes -- 1600+ bookmarks in Safari, going back years, and I'm sure that [a] 90% of them probably don't work any more, and [b] 90% of them probably aren't of interest to me any more, and [c] well over 99% of them will never, ever get looked at by me ever again. I'll search my browser history every now and then to get something I was looking at recently, but I never, ever use the (seemingly very useful) bookmarks search tool. 

And I bet you don't, either. 

On the other hand, the iPhone has brought me around to thinking of bookmarks as just one of several pieces of data that I'd like to keep track of pertaining to a person or company, along with email, phone number, address, etc. 

In a very tangible sense, the iPhone has made bookmarks spatial for me: when I'm trying to decide where to go on my lunch break at work, I like being able to bring up a list of nearby restaraunt menus, then turn around and call in an order. The iPhone makes it easy to do a search for businesses close to a location -- just think of the original ad where the narrator searched for "sushi" in San Francisco. When you tap on one of the search results, you're offered a choice to bookmark it, but I never use that. On the other hand, I'll regularly take the option to add that item to my contacts list, which in turn means that the next time I sync the phone to the computer, the data gets added to Address Book, then it syncs via .Mac or Plaxo to my other computer, as well as The Cloud. 

The obvious next step -- which iPhone v1.0 doesn't do, but iPhone v2.0 could (for all I know) -- would be to let you bring up a search map, and drop a pushpin for every person or company you have on your contacts list. That way, I could do that lunch time map search on the phone, and maybe instead of the restaraunt I was pondering, I might find that -- say, because of the miracle of Plaxo sync -- an old friend has taken a new job down the street, and might be up for meeting somewhere, and hey here's their new phone number, too. What is this old friend up to? Ah, there's a blog, let's see... 

And on it would go, something along those lines. 

This was more interesting before I started typing it out. Hey, look, fire truck! Shiny! 


UPDATE, 28 April 2008: To refine the thought a bit, it's not that I don't want to keep track of "bookmarks" as such, so much as that the traditional way to do it -- with a long list of things, possibly organized into folders, but still essentially just a bunch of URLs and page titles -- isn't scaling any more. 

Partly that's because these lists get unmanageable after a few years. But also because a device like the iPhone makes me realize that a "bookmark" is almost always just an aspect of much larger thing that I'm interested in -- a person, a place, a company, or a broader topic like "Perl" or "peak oil". 

For the majority of these person/place/company links, I'd also want to keep track of other aspects of the same person/place/company such as a name, phone number, address, etc. The natural way to keep track of all of this contact info, including a URL, is the Address Book, not the bookmark list. Of course, it helps that Safari makes it easy to display "Address Book" links right in the main Bookmarks Bar, so the software has built-in support for working the way I'm starting to think it should work. 

Of course, this approach starts to break down for the more abstract topical links -- "Perl", "peak oil", "polar bears", etc -- and for those, maybe a traditional bookmark list would be at least as good as trying to cram such links into a pseudo-contact, while possibly avoiding the problem of having do decide where to file an article on how a Perl script can save the polar bears by averting the peak oil crisis. For example. 

But as an admittedly imperfect "80/20" solution, I do think that contacts over bookmarks is a better way to organize most link collections.

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Simon Wistow
[this is good]
More commentary to come when I'm not quite as busy but as a datum - I actually use quite a lot of bookmarks. I have various resources neatly filed away although I have to admit I rarely use them. I do however have a folder of my friends with Flickr accounts (since I don't have one myself and I can't remember their wacky screen names) and also a folder called Daily that I "open all in tabs" every morning.
Chris Devers
[this is good]
I guess my thinking these days is that, except for a smallish handful of things that I really do want to access frequently -- most of which tend to be things like different servers at work, etc -- I no longer find it useful to bookmark pages with the intention of going back to it later.

It's a needle-in-a-haystack problem: if I do want to go back to something I was looking at previously, I can't trust the combination of my memory and my bookmarks to be able to tease out "what was that page, that had that tutorial, about that thing..." Especially considering that chances are good that I forgot to bookmark it in the first place, so what I'm looking for might not even be there, while a mountain of crap I no longer care about still stubbornly is there.

In almost all cases, it ends up being easier to just go by the browser history, or if that fails me, to a search engine. And seeing has most of the older bookmarks are probably now either invalid or outdated, it's probably just as well that I turn to the search engine to look for a more current version of the same information.

I think it would be more useful for the browser to just save a permanent history of everything I browse, and dispense with the concept of bookmarking nearly entirely, except for the "quick links" type of context. Safari 3 under Leopard now can retain a year or more of history, while Firefox 3 seems to default to 90 days; both of these seem a lot better than the week or two that used to be standard. Better still, both browsers can now re-open all tabs from the last session, so the daily "open all in tabs" ritual sort of gets subsumed into the idea that you can now have a permanent (seeming) collection of tabs available across reboots (and with syncing, ideally even across machines).

For the Flickr example, and for that matter for the "daily row o' tabs" ritual, I've fallen into using RSS feeds for such things. It's feels easier to just add the feed to a "friends" folder in NetNewsWire and have it check the feeds periodically, so that the one or two that got updated is displayed, while the 20 that didn't don't need to be checked. (The problem here is that this seduces you into thinking that you can handle reading a larger volume of daily material, as most of the overhead of checking individual sites goes away. Resist that urge.)
osde8info
i keep all my 4000 bookmarks on del.icio.us and search them daily !
Ross
I immediately thought of del.icio.us too. Can't get much easier than tagging when you post a new link, and then being able to search on your tags later. A pain to set up the first time, especially with 1000+ links, but after that, I think you'd be in good shape.

Plus, the server-side bookmarks storage means you can access from ANY internet-enabled computer, not just those that you sync your bookmarks up to.
greywolf
I just recently made the move to del.icio.us and it's a big improvement over bookmarks. I had about 700 and immediately deleted about half of them because I couldn't remember when I looked at it. Now that they're all tagged, man that took a long time, I find them useful again.
Zotta
[this is good]
Very interesting idea!
Chris Devers
Maybe I just misunderstand del.icio.us, but it seems like it's solving the wrong problem, at least for me.

If I don't have time for traditional bookmarks, I definitely don't have time to tag all the links I've got rattling around.

I think I just want two things (and on Leopard and Safari 3, I kind of have them):

* A permanent, searchable history of every page I visit that can be referenced later. This list should just build up passively. For bonus points, metadata like when accessed, what linked to it, favicon, title & page text, etc, but that's all extra. Just keeping the history around for a long time is a minimal start.

* A way to organize anything I do want to save a link to as an Adjective describing some other Noun -- a person, a place, or a thing (*mumble* nevermind abstract concepts for the moment... *mumble*). I use Address Book to keep track of these Nouns, and have ways to keep the contacts in sync across different computers or across the web, so just getting the data there is good.

Safari already provides a way to link to Address Book URLs right from the browser window, so things come full circle if you work this way. The main missing link is that Safari won't offer to save a link to an Address Book contact, as the expected data flow is supposed to go the other way: enter the records in Address Book and access them in Safari. I want that to be bidirectional, and since it isn't, I have to leave Address Book running to put links in there.

But it's still a lot better than the way I was doing things a couple of years ago.

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