11–20 of 130 posts
> Finally there is no problem to be solved in the first place. And everyone is creating a solution in search of a problem.
Personally I stopped using bookmarks except for something temporary that I use multiple times a day for a short period of time (e.g. work related notes, designs etc). The more general purpose solution is, well, Google because at the end of the day you will have a huge bookmark list that you will have to search through anyway.
Oh I’ve been building one! But mine is truly different™, basically I gave up the idea of organizing bookmarks, in favor of searching them instead, building your personal search engine In fact I’ve been blogging about it as I build it https://omnindex.substack.com/
Idea* that has been beaten to death :) From a consumer perspective, a product has to be 10x better for me to pay for it. There’s simply no way to make a bookmarking app that’s 10x better - there’s just not that much room for improvement.
The lack of adoption for paid services (and lack of development for better in-browser functionality) is just our acceptance and recognition that the things we bookmark don't really matter. Any site that matters to you, you'll remember. Any site that you forget about but may need to bring up later, you can just as easily google for. And anything else is generally irrelevant or accepted as ephemeral, even if slightly stimulating.
The problem with bookmarking overall is that it's very easy to click a button to save it for later, but very little of it ends up actually being read. It's basically a nice-to-have list, if there were infinite time and we had infinite energy. But we have neither, so we end up developing personal folder systems or installing extensions or utilizing SaaS, all in the hope that the links won't be dead by the time we can…
I can't find most of the links I saved by using a search engine, and I think that's part of the problem.
The problem with bookmarking overall is that it's very easy to click a button to save it for later, but very little of it ends up actually being read. It's basically a nice-to-have list, if there were infinite time and we had infinite energy. But we have neither, so we end up developing personal folder systems or installing extensions or utilizing SaaS, all in the hope that the links won't be dead by the time we can…
> you can just as easily google for I can't find most of the links I saved by using a search engine, and I think that's part of the problem.
I used Google to find an old tweet of mine to get a link to an old product today. It was very easy.
Any specific bookmarking app adds an extra step to any URL you would record on any other website in its context. So the solution is basically amounts to organizing uncontextualized URLs (hard to remember anyways) or make a somewhat useless record when there's a more contextualized record elsewhere.
A better tool would be something which captures URLs in their context. Like dated list of HN posts/comments I upvoted. Dated list of interactions with Jira. Etc.
Same thing with Spotify Liked Songs. That's basically bookmarks for songs. It's just A) better integration and B) social-it is it's own contextualization.
I think these are really popular to be built because they are simple in terms of technology. Most early developers can fit the concept of a todo list in their head - it's what a lot of examples are made of.
And once that technical thing is solved, the emphasis is on design.
A very interesting solution that has worked for me is...Zotero. Zotero + the web connector basically allows me to do a lot of things that are usually only achieved with paid products. For example, full text search, saving HTML copies offline, linking related websites, adding tags and notes, all of this (and more) is possible.
The problem with bookmarking applications is that aside from a few websites you visit regularly, browsing and searching your bookmarks isn't going to be substantially different from browsing and searching the web, so you can just as well do the latter. If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we'r…
Hence the list of bookmarking apps mentioned, :p. I think they're all trying to solve this problem in one way or another.