Does anyone else find it odd that two million active users is "not enough users". Most startups would kill for that.
Reminds me of the old dot-com screed: We lose money on every customer, but we make it up in volume!
End of the Road for Xmarks
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Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#52That sucks. How do I synchronize my passwords with Chrome now?
I use Roboform--it's cross platform/cross browser. Works well. Not free, however, if you have a lot of passwords (most geeks will cross into their paid territory pretty fast.)
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
FWIW, Mozilla has an app for syncing your bookmarks to your iPhone: https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/home/
Yeah - thanks for pointing that out. It's not a true bidirectional sync though, like xmarks, right?
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
I think the main reason here more than anything, is the founder's are not just into it anymore.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#55"Looking for the list of all auto manufacturers? Or presidential libraries? Or art supply sites? A casual comparison of our results with those of the major search engines would convince you that we were on to something. We recruited a group of non-technical subjects to do a usability test, and it flopped. Sit people in front of a search box and ask them to test it, and their first query is their own name. #FAIL."
Why did they assume their primary market was going to be non-technical people? Why not build some thing like stumbleupon of 100 Million bookmarks.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#56I, for one, am extremely disappointed to hear this news. I use Xmarks extensively on chrome and firefox across 3 computers. It is so easy to setup and use. I've never managed to get the Chrome sync working as it always hangs up and never finishes setting up. I think I'd have paid for Xmarks as a service.
> I've never managed to get the Chrome sync working as it always hangs up and never finishes setting up.
Same here. I tried really hard to make Chrome sync work reliably across the multiple devices I use. Kept duplicating my bookmarks, deleting new bookmarks, and just randomly making extra folders. XMarks is just so much nicer and works across all the browsers I use.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#57Chrome killed my use of Xmarks. With a consistent, cross-platform browser that has syncing out-of-the-box I no longer need Xmarks. I mainly use other browsers for testing now.
Ditto here but I can't think of a way to bring those bookmarks over to Safari to sync with the iPhone, aside from using Xmarks. Any ideas?
Instapaper. I know that's kind of a cop-out but incidentally it (and Google) have killed my use of bookmarks apart from a relatively svelte bookmarks bar. Instapaper is my reading queue, Google is my long-term memory. Bookmarks are more like shortcuts for me now.
The nice thing is that I can "bookmark" any link from any browser that I use, as well as twitter and RSS. And I have them instantly on my iPad, phone, notebook, or any machine with a browser without installing any software or extensions.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#58Wow, xmarks is dead because they couldn't "find a scalable business model" with two million users. http://twitter.com/PinboardIN/status/25734453850
Why don't the Pinboard folks buy out Xmarks?
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#59xMarks has an amazing set of data. A set of tagged bookmarks on a large enough scale is essentially like running mechanical turk (with 2,000,000 users) on the entire internet (better yet, only bookmark-worthy parts of the internet), and asking it to "describe this page in 10 words or less". The results, I think, are the most accurate description of URLs you could get on such a large scale. Essentially every site that…
I thought marks only offered the folders that the browsers used natively.
This was always an issue for adoption in delicious, anyway.
Re: End of the Road for Xmarks
#602m users * 1% conversion rate * $10/yr = $100k = probably not enough for a VC-backed startup.
My suspicion is that because users just used the browser's internal bookmarks they couldn't easily add affordances that would draw attention, leaving no surface on which to advertise. I guess this is one advantage that delicious had, although breaking the bookmarking paradigm to do so was very painful in other ways.
I no longer believe startups who claim their value proposition is "the data will be really valuable someday."