Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

End of the Road for Xmarks

blog.xmarks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 111 posts

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#81

Post by photon_off »

jasonkester wrote: post #62
photon_off wrote: post #47

xMarks 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…

Unfortunately, that dataset would only stay amazing until they tried to use it to power a search engine. History has shown that any time user-generated content is shown to users, spammers will quickly set themselves up as the ones generating 99% of the content.

It's only worth spammers time if their search is a successful product that spammers want to be a part of. Even still, with 2m users, I'd imagine that bots wouldn't have a substantial effect on the data, not at least without easily beind detected.

Search is beside the point, though. They said they tried it and it was amazing but only for some things. It's true, just search delicious to get an idea of the type of search possible. It's very good for most things, but worthless for finding any content that people wouldn't tag, like 98% of the content of any URL.

My hypothesis was that their data could be used for other reasons.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#82

Post by DevX101 »

joshu wrote: post #60

2m 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 lon…

How does delicious make money? I love your product and use it almost every day, but it's not immediately obvious to me that there's any advertising.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#83

Post by EvanMiller »

Lessons learned:

1. Adding a feature to someone else's product is a risky business model. If it's popular, the product-maker will implement your feature, at which point your goose is cooked.

2. Adding a free feature to someone else's free product isn't even risky. It is among the surest methods of losing money.

3. Know when to sell. The missed opportunity here was search. With their data and methods, Xmarks was able to improve query results for a predictable fraction of searches. At this point (2008), they should have sold to one of the up-and-coming search engines -- Windows Live or Ask.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#84

Post by bond »

I can't believe a team with so many users hasn't began charging them and when things get rough they want to shut down instead of charging because they think users will not pay?

Two million users? Sorry but they know nothing about business and it's worse for the ones who backed them... How on earth they're going to let this go this way?

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#85

Post by zacharypinter »

They might've been doing this already with their Google search enhancements, but why don't they make their free version of the extension hijack (in a very open way to the user) Google queries and insert their own affiliate id so that they get the credit? Seems like an unobtrusive enough way to finance a free product, though it might step on Mozilla's toes.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#86

Post by Yopie »

Ogre wrote: post #49
FlemishBeeCycle wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat. The article didn't explicitly mention the situation where users are syncing to their own servers. I'm wondering if that would really be impacted seeing as you're not really using any of their server resources?

Hopefully they'll open source the plugin so we can keep it updated for changes to Firefox. Though I'll probably just switch to another solution, especially if there's another that uses my own server. Or maybe just Dropbox. I only switched to Xmarks after Google Browser Sync went away, I guess I should just get used to this.

While maintaining cross browser capability, I couldn't agree if xmark could work with dropbox or my own server.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#87

Post by bstrong »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #66

It's always sad when someone's dreams are shattered. But what I don't get is why a bookmark syncing service needs venture capital, employees, a CEO and whatnot. There may not be a business model that supports all that, but there may be a business model that pays for the labor actually required to provide a syncing service. In a way this is like shutting down all the cafes that failed to become Starbucks.

My guess is that this has a lot to do with when they started. In 2006, the cloud platforms we take for granted today didn't exist. Running a service meant buying servers, hiring an ops team, etc. Starting today, you could probably bring a sync service up on App Engine in a few weeks and operate it for a couple hundred bucks a month.

I started my last company in 2005, and I've often thought that if we had started a couple of years later when the cloud platforms were available, we could have been a lot more successful. Instead we built a product and an organization around an obsolete technology stack with a high cost structure, and there was no going back.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#88

Post by chadgeidel »

ajg1977 wrote: post #26

Man, 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…

With the hope that folks at Xmarks are reading this - I, too would pay for this service. I'm not sure I would pay $5 per month, but I don't think that, say $20 per year is unreasonable. (I prefer to pay by year - that's usually where the best discounts are).

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#89

Post by chadgeidel »

jsankey wrote: post #12

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 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…

The beauty of Xmarks is that I can sync across browsers. I use Chrome, Firefox (on Windows, Mac, Linux), and IE and the ability to have all my bookmarks synched wherever I am is an absolute godsend.

Re: End of the Road for Xmarks

#90

Post by dillydally »

robk wrote: post #78
joshu wrote: post #60

2m 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 lon…

Yep "probably not enough for a VC-backed startup" is the key here. This would have been a nice bootstrapped business. For them taking VC put them on a road that unfortunately wasn't the right one for them and forced them to swing for a bigger outcome than was possible. Sad.

$100k is an ok number for a one-person outfit, but it would be hard to support even one employee on that number.

In face, their current model of altering the Google SERPs almost certainly generates more revenue.

Post reply on HN