I would pay for Xmarks.
End of the Road for Xmarks
21–30 of 111 posts
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#22with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free After taking so many knocks, it's easy to be disheartened. But why not at least give this a go? It doesn't involve a large engineering investment - just charge for what you already offer! When the alternative is shutting down, where existing users need…
Maybe it's because it creates an obligation for them to continue the service for a reasonable amount of time.
Fair point, but how about this: they've committed to 3 months anyway, so why not try charging for 3 months? Just don't touch the money coming in during that period. If they reach the end of that time, and it's not working, issue refunds and shut down. There is some cost to this (transaction fees etc), but seemingly minimal compared to other running costs they've already committed to (because if it fails, the number of transactions will necessarily be low).
They might struggle to get people to sign up when there is doubt about the service surviving. But that cat is already out of the bag, and as I alluded to earlier they could also play this to their advantage (charging now is not a money-grab, it's simply a matter of keeping a valuable service viable).
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#23Todd, will you open-source any code?
Opensourcing the corpus would be more interesting but I suppose with their privacy policy this is a no go.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#24"For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service."
Not a bad hypothesis, one I see regularly but 90 days to close sure illustrates the downside and value of searching for that monetization model earlier rather than later.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#25Nobody's mentioned this yet, so: this is particularly notable because it's "Mitch Kapor's startup" (famous for Lotus 1-2-3). Used to be called Foxmarks.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#26Man, I'm gutted. I use Xmarks every day to sync from my work & windows machines (Firefox) to my MacBook (Safari) and thus to my iPhone / iPad. I'd have happily paid $5 a month or so to use Xmarks and I imagine I'm not alone.
It's really unfortunate that they won't even try the freemium, or (shock!) even the outright pay to play approach. I'm sure with two million users there would have been enough paying customers to create a profitable business.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#27Todd, will you open-source any code?
Opensourcing the corpus would be more interesting but I suppose with their privacy policy this is a no go.
100% agree. I had that question included in my first draft of my original comment, but figured anonymizing the bookmark data is a very tricky/impossible task so I removed it. See AOL search data[1]. Maybe Xmarks could sent an opt-in request to users and release the data of people who are comfortable with it. I would be fine with it, personally; all my bookmarks are on delicious anyway.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#28From "build something people want" to "built something people want" to "can't monetize 2 million users."
Any other examples of this?
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#29I use the Xmarks firefox plugin, but with my own server. It's always supported that. I expect that'll keep working for a while until a newer Firefox breaks the plugin, so I'm still in the same boat of needing to find another sync method. But I might have longer than people who use the service. Or shorter, no way to tell, really.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#30I find it strange that there are no buyers interested in your user base. I'd love to hear more about the monetization efforts that you attempted, as I would have imagined there should be numerous ways to leverage those users. But, of course, if I was an expert, I'd probably have the capital to make an offer.