bookmarks

In an era of aggregators, YokWay is a very pretty sharing service. Much like Delicious or FriendFeed, the idea is to discover new content based on what other people are sharing. YokWay's appeal is much like that of Digg, with popular stories hitting the front page and getting rated and commented on by other users.

User-submitted content is split up into different buckets, with books, music, videos, and photos. There's also a restaurants category that turns the service into something like Yelp, where users can microblog about their culinary experiences. To aid in that, each story is geo-tagged, … Read more

Are you a .Mac subscriber who's been using the built-in bookmark syncing app? Come Sunday that service will no longer exist as part of the MobileMe transition, so if you want to do one last sync you've got to get it done this weekend.

Shortly after the MobileMe announcement last month Apple sent out an e-mail to current .Mac subscribers detailing this change. Friday, the company extended the transfer deadline to July 6, along with providing a how-to guide to make sure you've got everything synced up one last time. You can get full instructions on how to do the sync here. … Read more

Web page archiving tool Iterasi is getting a small but important update Tuesday morning. Users can now share their stream of archived pages with others as an RSS feed, letting anyone view their saved items either directly in their browser or in a feed-capturing tool like Google Reader or desktop e-mail clients.

Also being introduced is a new widget that can be tacked onto your blog or favorite start page like iGoogle or My Yahoo. It will display a reverse chronological stream of the latest pages you've tucked away. Each item is just a thumbnail, but when users click on it they'll be taken to the fully archived version of the page, complete with working links. It's the same basic experience seen when the service launched its sharing feature.

"What's surprising is how many of our users were asking for RSS feeds," Iterasi CEO Pete Grillo told me. Grillo acknowledged that the current Iterasi user base is a bit on the early-adopter side, and he thinks the widgets will help open the service up to a wider audience.

He also expects more people to jump onboard as the platform expands to include Mac users, which should be happening in the next few weeks--right around the time the long-awaited auto-archiving feature makes its way into users hands. "We're close to having it ready," Grillo said "and RSS is going to make it far more useful than we originally intended." Once in place users, will be able to schedule when they want the service to take snapshots of their favorite pages. It will continue to do so as long as the computer where the extension is installed is running.

I've embedded an example of the new widget after the break. It'll continue to update as more pages are saved.

… Read more

While not nearly as cool as the Muxtape playlist viewer we wrote about a few months back, if you're looking to add a little extra eye candy to your bookmarks folder, it's worth checking out an extension called Bookmarks Preview. When installed, it adds two new views to your bookmarks folder that let you surf your bookmarked sites with small thumbnail previews. You can either view them in a large grid, or Apple Cover Flow-style, which will scale up each thumbnail to a maximum of about 440 pixels wide.

Each time you bookmark a new site a thumbnail … Read more

Besides the face-lift, one of Firefox 3's less flashy, but incredibly useful features, is the new bookmarking system. Yeah, there are still folders and bookmarklets, but joining the party are useful items like tags, smart backup, and a new way to track which sites you're actually visiting to help weed out what's unneeded.

We've put together a small guide to help you take advantage of bookmarking in Firefox 3. If you put these lessons to use, you'll go from having a big, clumsy menu of sites you like to an ever-changing list that can quickly be parsed and prioritized with minimal effort.

Step 1: Master the quickie On a site you like? Don't bother with keyboard shortcuts (although Ctrl+Shift+L is dead easy); just hit the new star button in the address bar. It'll quick-save it to your bookmarks list the same way the keyboard shortcut does, although it saves a click or two by skipping the "edit this bookmark" dialogue that usually pops up when you try to squirrel a link away.

If you do want to access that dialogue without having to delve into the full-fledged bookmark editor, just click on the star again and you'll get that same drop-down menu with quick fields you can fill in to edit tags or simply remove the link from your bookmarks.

Step 2: Use tags Tags are helpful. If you're bookmarking a site you think you're going to keep around, it's worth tagging. The biggest reason is that Firefox will now use tags as shortcuts in the address bar, meaning that if you tag this article "awesome," typing awesome into the bar will automatically pull up this page as one of the top results. It'll also take any tags you've previously added and autofill them for you as you type. This makes it easy to fill in some simple descriptions quickly and efficiently.

To quickly add pre-existing tags without typing anything, just hit the little down arrow in the bookmarking menu. This will list all of the tags you've typed in before, and simply clicking on any one of them will add it as a tag.

Step 3: Use smart bookmarks and folders to discover new content Are you an iTunes user? If so, you may be familiar with smart playlists, the playlists that will automatically fill with tracks based on what boolean values you set up. Firefox 3 has two similar features called smart bookmarks and smart folders that let you do this using query strings or simple searches. Now as a warning, this isn't as simple to do as it is in iTunes, which has drop-down menus, but the good news is… Read more

You love this story and you want to Digg it. Or maybe you want to put it on Reddit. Or maybe you're just in love with Delicious and feel like saving the story there. We're open to anything, but we don't always know your tastes.

The same goes for a lot of sites, which is where Add to Any has created a really smart sharing tool that will read your browser's mind instead. Well, actually it will just give your history a once over to do the heavy lifting. Based on where you've been the … Read more

AM-DeadLink tames your unruly bookmarks with a set of tools designed to keep your bookmark list svelte, healthy, and in fighting form. Its interface is packed with options, but tool tips and a logical layout make it easy to follow. The length of the verification process depends on the size of your Favorites list, but the wait wasn't bad in our tests. You can sort results by any of the columns, which include name, status, URL, and folder categories. You also can delete entries one at a time or by the group.

The Backup option is a welcome safeguard … Read more

InSuggest, the recommendation engine I took a look at back in February, has just launched a service that scans your bookmarks to give you links for related reading. The new tool is a derivative of the Web site analyzer which would take any link you dropped in and give you recommendations of similar sites. In that case, users could add up to three sites to get more narrowed results, whereas this tool is focused simply on where you've been.

For now, it's limited to Delicious users, but if you've got an account there you can plug-in your … Read more

Delicious, Yahoo's "social bookmarking" site that lets people archive, tag, and share Web site addresses, got its start closely tied to the Firefox open-source Web browser (download Delicious for Firefox). Now Yahoo is branching out to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, too.

The company released a beta version of the IE plug-in Tuesday (available on Download.com). Though there are differences, the IE version is similar, offering users the ability to add and tag bookmarks and to search their own bookmark collection.

"We're very excited about this release, as we have many users who use Internet … Read more