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Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

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101–110 of 138 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#101

Post by BenFranklin100 »

For myself, I’ve found FireFox’s syncing of bookmarks to work well enough across devices and platforms that I’ve created menu bar cascading folders of bookmarks to organize sites I frequently or semi-frequently visit. The Vimium add-in is a nice touch on the desktop as one only needs to type ‘b’ and the autocomplete will get one to the bookmarked website in few keystrokes, all without touching the mouse.

What I find still missing is a bookmarking service similar to Pocket, but with a local save option and well integrated annotation, tagging, and search functionality. This is of particular value when researching a topic or gathering references for a project. Zotero can provide some of this as it does save web pages, but is not ideal for all cases, especially more casual o exploratory data gathering. I’d appreciate any suggestions.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#102

Post by crazygringo »

trhr wrote: post #49

I never found a solution to what I actually want/need: - Snippet bookmarking. I don't want to browse to the whole page again, just highlight and save the piece of it I need to bookmark. - Annotations. I want to highlight, underline, bold, and comment on what I've bookmarked so that I know why I bookmarked it or what I intended to remember later. - In an open standard, like JSON, so that I can do things with the bookm…

Evernote or Zotero? I haven't really kept up with the space, but Zotero is open source and while it's meant for academic references, you can use it for everything if you want.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#103

Post by safety1st »

The implementation of bookmarks in Firefox is very useful to me. No they're not organized into any sort of sensible taxonomy and I don't care. I bookmark any page I think I might want to return to in the future - and when that future date arrives, I start typing words I remember from it in my address bar.

Firefox is smart enough to recommend bookmarked sites as I type based on string matches to website titles and URLs - more often than not, that's enough and I find what I'm looking for.

I think this is a better way to find stuff on the web than a taxonomy, I think Google search won and Yahoo's directory lost for similar reasons, the web is just too vast and chaotic to make imposing a taxonomy practical. A taxonomy is more useful for understanding relationships between things than for finding a particular thing. But in this scenario I don't care what relationship the page I want to view has to other pages. I just want to find it as quickly as possible.

I have mild anxiety that someone who doesn't really understand the problem space or prior work will come along one day, try to "improve" this feature, and make it useless...

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#104

Post by ei8ths »

kcartlidge wrote: post #70
NelsonMinar wrote: post #31

I have run a linkblog for 15+ years now. It's basically bookmarks (and stored in Pinboard) but my focus is on publishing a social media feed for others to read. https://www.somebits.com/linkblog/ Linkblogging used to be a thing people did in the heydey of early 2000s blogging. Now it's mostly lost as a form. The spirit of it lives though in the way Mastodon, Slack, Facebook, etc make it easy to share a link and have…

I just popped over there and the second entry was "Poppy War influences" . So I wanted to thank you for reminding me that I really enjoyed the first book and need to get around to the others in the series.

Yes finish it, its a good series.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#105

Post by deafpolygon »

Bookmarks was about curation and sync for most people. We had a great bookmarking service war during the early 2000s (delicious, et. al) and then when social media took over, everybody moved it to that. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and even on WhatsApp.

Most 'ordinary' users had bookmarks for various blogging platforms, recipes, etc, which has now largely moved to social media. Recipes on Instagram, micro-blogging on Facebook, Twitter, articles on any of them.

There's no need for dedicated bookmark services anymore when you can just search that platform. WhatsApp has a Links feature in there so you can just look up past links in conversations.

The rest of the needs have been taken care of by their respective browsers and sync service.

Web sites are more or less ephemeral, with many sites having a lifespan of ~2 years or less. This makes bookmarking less valuable.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#106

Post by sidPhoenix17 »

I generally tried to bookmark the most commonly visited websites so I can access it instantly.

Overtime, I stopped using it because if I write a keyword associated with the website - if it's either in title tag or in the url, chrome automatically shows that link on the top.. this has been so good.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#107

Post by nmeagent »

tkuraku wrote: post #15

The need has been mostly eliminated for many people with the ability to search.

My perception is that Google search is getting markedly worse over time, and many other free search engines seem approximately as useless. I can imagine a time in the not-so-distant future (or now in some cases) when many users will wish they had bookmarked various interesting sites because they can no longer reliably find them.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#108

Post by sabre23t »

I've been looking for replacement for del.icio.us every so often. I believe Hypothes.is page notes may be the best web-based way to collaboratively bookmark the internet now. Though it is still convenient to use bookmarking features of pages/apps I consume content on (Feedly, Youtube, etc).

Ref https://web.hypothes.is/blog/varieties-of-hypothesis-annotat... .

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#109

Post by iamthejuan »

sabre23t wrote: post #108

I've been looking for replacement for del.icio.us every so often. I believe Hypothes.is page notes may be the best web-based way to collaboratively bookmark the internet now. Though it is still convenient to use bookmarking features of pages/apps I consume content on (Feedly, Youtube, etc). Ref https://web.hypothes.is/blog/varieties-of-hypothesis-annotat... .

I have been using Diigo right before del.icio.us shuts down. Never had any issues with it.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't bookmarks been re-invented?

#110

Post by Messier43 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #69
LunarAurora wrote: post #65

Tools are not the main problem. What need to be “re-invented?” first is our personal approach to information overload. One of the bigger issues with bookmarks is they always seem valuable the moment you add them, then that value somehow evaporates most of the time. Between Bookmark-Hoarding and Zero-Bookmarks, thoughtful curation will always be an art form.

What about search that is limited to your bookmarks? Shared bookmarks that really work between phones, tablets, computer, vr headsets, etc.? I am not afraid to kill browser windows because I can look up anything in my history. I want to bookmark something and get a webhook notification that I handle so I can build a database of my bookmarks side by side with other content that comes in through webhooks.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/search-firefox-address-...

There is already > You can also use shortcuts to search Firefox Add-ons, Bookmarks(*), Tabs(%) and History(^).

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