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November 19, 2007

Simple Bookmarks

As you browse the web, you find interesting web pages or just useful information that may help you later on. For some web pages you may want to get alerts if there's any change in the future, for others you're happy with the static content.

It would be nice to have a simple option for all these actions. You could just bookmark a page and choose from a list of options:

* save content (you could save the entire page or just some clips)
* get updates (dynamically create gadgets by selecting some information from a page that is likely to change - weather, news; subscribe to feeds or to newsletters; get all the changes of a page)
* share with others

The bookmarking application could be integrated with your web history (that could be saved locally or online), could determine the web sites you visit frequently and automatically bookmark them. From your bookmarks and clips, you could create web pages and share them with other people.

The simple bookmarks could combine in a single interface Google Bookmarks, Shared Stuff, Google Notebook, Google Alerts, iGoogle, Dapper and other applications.

13 comments:

  1. Um, this already exists. It's called del.ico.us.

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  2. I am using Del.licio.us for bookmarking sites which might be revisited later on. I want to use Google Bookmarks or Yahoo Bookmarks for the sites I frequently visit not from time to time.

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  3. I am annoyed by a recent increase in the number of speculative posts on this blog, such as this "it would be nice to have this bookmarking service" or the previous "google version numbers" post. I read this blog to learn about Google, but I don't think that these posts communicate any valuable information. I find this sort of editorializing annoying. If you don't have any useful information to post, let the blog go silent. Or create another category for these sorts of posts so that I don't have to get them on my RSS feed.

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  4. I think pointing out the obvious overlap between Google services is completely relevant. I use a separate service to notify me of changes in web pages, and would love to have it built in to Google Bookmarks/Notebook/whatever.

    If all you want is an aggregate of Google announcements, subscribe to the Official Google blogs.

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  5. i have avoided this blog for generally poor content and really bad "instructions" on how to install this or that new tool (like google reader search several months ago). i came back here today hoping the content had at least improved to unsatisfactory. But this annoyingly useless "simple bookmarks' post says i was wrong even about that. Goodbye.

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  6. Tough crowd. I get a lot of good information here that I use to further my knowledge Google services.

    Can't the complainers just breeze past what they don't want. Or are we all in such an undignified haste that everything presented to us, has to be tailored to exactly what we need. I can't remember a class I ever took that only presented just what I was looking for, but I usually got a few gems that made it worth it.

    Maybe the whiners can start something better and let us all know about it.

    Keep up the efforts for those of us who can appreciate the amount of work it is to do what you do.

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  7. Nice Idea but I don't like it so much...as a start google should improve its bookmarking service and provide a way to integrate it better in firefox. Delicious as tried it with the official yahoo plugin and it actually failed because one would like to use delicious bookmark together with standard bookmarks , with yahoo delicious plugin you can't , if you install it you must manage everything with delicious.

    I like the saving content concept but an improved version compared to "Save page as" would be nice. One improvement could be having the possibility to save a page content without it's formatting ,something as a printable version of the page.

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  8. Giving some love, I think you need it.

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  9. I like the ideas but agree you might do some tagging between GoogleNews and GoogleSuggestions.

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  10. I already do this with a combination of wget,diff and bash. I download the webpage and then diff it. Through this you can get a list of pages that have changed. Just add the url to a file, get all webpages and then happy diffing :)
    Maybe you could do the whole thing as a cron job. Don't forget to exclude dates, etc...

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  11. @Joshua:
    This post is not a speculation, just one of my very few ideas. For speculations about Google, check techcrunch.com.

    In case you didn't realize, this is not a news blog and I'm not a journalist. Every post contains my opinion and I try to keep the balance between news, tips, analysis and strange posts. Maybe I should have more strange posts.

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  12. IMHO, It's simple. All we need is a rating service for each post like slashdot. That way, if you wished, you would could only read highly rated items.

    Simple Bookmarks gets a - 1

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  13. I was talking about something that lets you save/bookmark any web page/content, not a feed reader. Ratings are usually meaningless when you compare different kinds of content. Besides you bookmark a page because you like it a lot.

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