End of the Road for Xmarks

I am now going to repeat what you said, but with more feeling:

We also considered refocusing Xmarks as a freemium sync business, but the prospects there are grim too: with 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.

Ask me! Ask me! Why don't you ask me ?!!!

Native firefox syncing isn't going to help me sync my Firefox bookmarks to my iPhone, is it? Maybe that is worth something to me, ya know?

Isn't it completely ironic, that on top of HN right now is PG's Y-combinator screed, with how important it is to launch as soon as possible with as little functionality as you can in order to let users guide you to what they really want? So users are okay for telling you what features they want but they are not okay for telling you whether they want to pay ??

I mean okay, maybe I am a complete aberration in being willing to pay a few bucks for xmarks. But they didn't even ask. Maybe there would have been enough other aberrations out there to keep it going as a low-key low-turnover service.

This is the thing that bothers me with the start-up world - it seems so bi-modal: make it big or go bust. What about a quiet, modest little service that can pay for itself and maybe a bit extra?

Bah. I'm sad.

My experience with Xmarks was not a great one. I used it when it was first called Foxmarks and enjoyed it. Some time after the name change, I noticed that one of the updates had turned on by default some extra overlays on the google search results page touting their rankings.

The blog post suggests that this was a bonus feature, or a value-add, but that's not how I saw it. A previously well-behaved bookmarks sync plugin all of a sudden decided to impose on my preferred search engine. That's a spammy low-class intrusion into my browsing experience.

I turned off the feature, but every time I updated the plugin thereafter it was turned back on by default. I jumped ship as soon as Chrome presented a viable alternative.

I bet you're absolutely right. They have/had an amazing team. As such, 3 months of opportunity cost ain't cheap. And it's VC-backed (I believe). Given the long-term prognosis for the market, why would you spend 3 months in salaries if the upside isn't big enough to justify the the investment? Just return what's left of the cash to the investors so they can put it into a growth opportunity.

I'm afraid to go back to Google for bookmark syncing because the last time Google offered the service they shut it down. That's how I got to X/FoxMarks in the first place.

xmarks: @PinboardIN hey if you've got some good ideas, we're all ears!

and, of course, pinboardIN: @xmarks the model that has worked well for us is 'charge people money for a useful product or service'