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December 21, 2006

Google Bookmarks Gadget


This gadget for the personalized homepage has been around for a while, but now it looks better and has new features.

The purpose of the gadget is to let you access your bookmarks. As you probably now, Google Bookmarks is a service that stores private bookmarks and could be used in connection with Google Toolbar or other extensions.

The gadget lets you restrict the list of bookmarks to a certain label. It's also easy to edit bookmarks or to manually add bookmarks. The only missing feature is search.

17 comments:

  1. They REALLY need to come up with a different way selecting your "label" than just a damn dropdown box.

    It might be fine if you only have a few tags... err, I mean "labels", but when you have say 150+ scrolling up & down through ALL of them just becomes a pain! How about a textbox where I can type with auto-completion? Or a tagcloud, err I guess for Google it would be a label-cloud... :)

    Also I wish they'd fix the text-wrapping or the lack of it with notes on bookmarks. If you put too much text in the note section of a bookmark and view it on your Google Bookmarks page, the text doesn't wrap, it just goes right off the side of the screen. I have a wide-screen monitor running in 1680x1050, yet if I put enough text into the note section, my Google Bookmarks page becomes twice as wide as my screen... Having to scroll back & forth to read text on a wide-screen monitor just seems wrong.

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  2. i don't see the sense of the bookmark gadget. On top of coreburn's point, if i want to use this gadget, i have to keep going back to my home page before going to bookmarked pages. The more effective use is through Google Toolbar, but then you use more vertical screen space to have the toolbar visible.

    Just offering a suggestion: i have the Bookmark Page/Bookmark List buttons sitting on my main menu bar. If you have Google Toolbar installed, you can drag buttons that belong to it onto other toolbars. For me, it keeps my GB's close at hand and saves screen space.

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  3. I agree this works well if you don't have too many bookmarks.

    Google could just show the most recent n bookmarks and a search box to find other bookmarks.

    I wrote something about bookmarks:

    "Bookmarks shouldn't need tags or folders.

    Why should I tag a page that has a title, plenty of content and links from other pages with content? There's enough information for the page."

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  4. I have to admit though, I put it on my page and tried it out for a while. One thing I found I do really like about it is how quickly I can find bookmarks that I just saved quickly without adding any labels while in a hurry. It kinda seems a little quicker and less tedious to label posts there than going back to them on the regular Google Bookmarks page. I know the Google Toolbar can easily be used for this also... but it seems like it loads your bookmarks from Google every time you click it because it has a little lag to it.

    I'm always happy to see something new from Google though. :)

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  5. Ah, Google Bookmarks.... one of the many forgotten Google projects.
    They should just do what somebody suggested - buy an existing and successful bookmarking service (somebody suggested Simpy here http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/2006/12/02/Pandia-Suggests-Google-Buys-Simpy.html ) Pandia.

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  6. Love Google Bookmarks but sure wish the window that opens would have standard navigation and menu options available.

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  7. It' nice service, but it does not work with bookmarks in Russian on PocketPC IE :-(

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  8. I have mostly enjoyed this gadget but today--Oct 24--the font suddenly shrank and now it is hard to read. The Calendar Icon also--impossible to read. We should be able to customize the fond and layout for each gadget individually--if I try to increase the viewing size, messages are huge. I also do not know the point of the box at the top of the bookmarks that says Show label: homepage. Can't get rid of it..

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  9. There is no update on Google toolbar to add to the URL to bookmarks. Visiting google bookmarks everytime to add a bookmark isn't ideal. I would rather use my Firefox bookmark and export it for my reference.

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  10. You CAN use Google Toolbar to bookmark web pages in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

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  11. Does it have an import feature to import my bookmarks from somewhere else?

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  12. Help. I have had Bookmarks on my Google toolbar for some time and suddenly the ability to access the bookmarks has dissappeared. I now have 4 choices on the dropdown menu;bookmark this page, manage my bookmarks,refresh, and import from ie.
    So I get around this by clicking on manage which gives me an expanded list over several pages instead of a scrolldown list of labels that I am use to. It takes way too much time and 'mouse muscle' to get to what I need.

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  13. What happened? I have been using this gadget just fine, have labels like MME-UW:Au-08:f (it earlier seemed to be use : as a subdivider, and - was fine. NOW, I add a bookmark to an existing label, and am told can't use either : or - in label. Could have left good enough alone

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  14. I can't delete old bookmarks that are now empty. Any ideas?

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  15. Do you know if there is any URL on which I can get the gadget full screen? Or a bookmarklet?
    It's a bit slow to load the whole iGoogle just to get a bookmark, and the standard Google Bookmarks interface *ucks.

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  16. http://www.google.com/ig/ifr?view=canvas&url=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/bookmarks.xml

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  17. Greetings,
    I'm not using GoogleBookmarks (current personal option is Delicious). As a user of GoogleApps will like to see it integrated there. A Bookmark system for the company (or certain groups inside it) with bookmarks available as a knowledge system.
    Is there a Wishlist where I can add these request?

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