David Emery OnlineR.I.P. Bookmarks
13 December 2005
Bookmarks are dead.
Seriously.
I haven’t used a bookmark in a browser for literally years. This was originally born out of necessity, as I jump around from browser to browser on a week by week basis (currently I’m using Safari with Saft and SafariStand, but if Omni get there act together I’ll jump back to OmniWeb), so having my bookmarks tied a specific browser got old really quickly. To solve this, I re-made by bookmarks structure into folders containing .webloc files (Mac OS X web link files), which I kept in my dock. This system was further refined by my uptake of Quicksilver which allows me to just to type in the first few letters of the bookmark and it finds it instantly.
So…
While I moved my bookmarks over to using Quicksilver, I also started using feeds with a vengeance. I’ve now got to the point where I’ve got ~380 feeds in my feed reader (Bloglines – I’d love to use an online reader that uses ajax and looks a bit nicer, but there aren’t any with a decent interface) which means that the only sites I use bookmarks for are sites without an rss feed, which hence mean forums and utility sites (i.e. online banking, map sites etc).
So I still use bookmarks then?
Nope.
I’ve noticed recently that while using Quicksilver to get at my “bookmarked” sites, am actually being given sites from my browser history (which quicksilver searches too) – I’m not using my bookmarks at all.
Search wins again.
As search (and good search at that) becomes more pervasive, I think many current methods of browsing (which bookmarks aid) will become quite obsolete; as a case in point I know that personally if I want to go to a site, and I only know the company name, instead of typing in “companyname.com” I’ll just type it in to google as it’s much more reliable – I’m sure I’m not the only one.
I wonder what else search will obsolete?