Webware

Here's a must-have Firefox add-on. Called Multi Links, this extension lets you simply right click and drag your mouse across the screen to select multiple links at once. It's just like selecting multiple files on your computer, and highly effective for tearing through a page of links you want to look at or save for later.

By default, selected links open up in new browser tabs, although you can go into the options to choose whether you want them to open up in new windows, or be bookmarked instead. You're also able to change the color scheme of the box, and the outlines of the selected links--just in case you're into that sort of thing.

Want to open up multiple URLs? Just drag your mouse over them with this handy extension.

(Credit: CNET)

Advanced users can utilize keyboard shortcuts to limit mouse work. For instance, holding down the control or shift button while creating a box means you can hop around a page of results--selecting the items you want to open or save, while skipping over others. The extension is also coded to ignore extra links on search pages, which keeps you from unintentionally opening up the cached and similar links on each result. This worked fine on Google and Bing, but not on Yahoo or Ask.

This extension is definitely worth keeping around because it does not interfere with normal, right-click behavior. My one hope is that future versions will forgo the options menu in place of a small pop-up, or slide-out menu that asks what you want to do with links after selecting them.

See also: Snap Links (which does the same thing, but has not been updated since February) and Selection Links.

Delicious, the social-bookmarking service owned by Yahoo, has unveiled home page changes that are intended to do a better job of showcasing links that are currently popular. Although Delicious isn't sharing the exact details of its algorithm, it apparently includes using the number of Twitter messages related to a given item.

Writing on the Delicious blog, Vik Singh, an architect at Yahoo, writes that "For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media. Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, "eats our own dogfood"  by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as stitches tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs."

The issue that Delicious is trying to address here is that the existing "Popular Bookmarks" tab (which will continue to be available) tends to point to what Singh describes as "authoritative resources rather than fresh news." This is because, although Delicious is often described as a social-bookmarking service, in fact, many use it primarily as a way to store bookmarks online solely for their own purposes. And, in fact, Delicious even introduced private tags in 2007 that made it possible to save bookmarks without sharing.

Not everyone is happy about the change. Delicious founder Joshua Schacter, who left Yahoo last year (and is now at Google) writes on Twitter that "I can't BELIEVE delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own." He adds that "i had always wanted delicious to show notes from your social network on the links that you bookmark."

Social bookmarking has often seemed like rather the red-haired stepchild of social media. Its evolution in general has been slow and there's long been a tension between bookmarking to share and bookmarking to store.

In general, social bookmarking services have also failed to surface the data that they have stored in ways that allow for useful and serendipitous exploration. This latest announcement tries to do something about that by making use of data from Twitter, a service that's all about the now.

Google ditched its browser sync plug-in for Firefox a year ago, but the idea is resurfacing in Chrome in a way that makes me think of possibilities the technology could hold for Chrome OS.

The company is preparing to build a system to synchronize bookmarks across different versions of Chrome, Google's Tim Steele said in a mailing list posting on Friday. Google envisions extending the feature to other data types, including passwords, Steele and fellow programmer Idan Avraham said in a follow-up posting.

"We wanted to focus on bookmarks and get it right first before we think about other data types. We chose bookmarks both because they are generally the most important to users, but also because they are the hardest data type to sync," Avraham said.

Synchronizing bookmarks is a fairly basic concept. The Xmarks plug-in, formerly called Foxmarks, has solved the issue for years on Firefox, so users could move from a work computer to a home computer and still have their saved Web addresses intact. Google had its own though now extinct option, and now Mozilla itself is building a plug-in called Weave that synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, tabs, and other information. Yahoo's Delicious service has been available for years for people to store bookmarks centrally in the cloud and to share them with contacts as well.

So it's no surprise Google feels compelled to add bookmark sync to Chrome--especially given that the company plans to use a person's Google Account to save the list. Google likes the idea of storing the state of people's applications in the cloud, even if they're relying on a local computer's horsepower to run.

Bookmark sync will arrive gradually; initially there won't be a way to sync bookmarks using Google Bookmarks service that can be used directly or through Google's browser toolbar, Steele said in another message. "For the first release, we've just focused on getting sync to work between Chrome instances," Steele said.

The synchronization feature may be a basic utility, but Google sees it as much more than just updating a list of links. In fact, it chose to use Google's own high-powered Google Talk infrastructure to handle the service, the design document states. Essentially, that means browsers only need to listen for broadcasts when a change occurs rather than frequently check in for them:

To make this sync infrastructure scale to millions of users, we decided to leverage existing XMPP-based Google Talk servers to give us "push" semantics, rather than only depending on periodically polling for updates. This means when a change occurs on one Google Chrome client, a part of the infrastructure effectively sends a tiny XMPP message, like a chat message, to other actively connected clients telling them to sync.

To put that gain into perspective, consider a three-minute polling interval. Three minutes is far from real time, or "immediately" as our goal was stated. But already, at the very least, every three minutes every client needs to ask the server if anything changed. Even with just one thousand users, we're already talking about a server having to handle a poll request every 0.18 seconds on average (or roughly 5.6 queries per second). And that's just when nothing is happening! Using XMPP pushes, the sync servers don't need to waste cycles for no reason.

There are other synchronization possibilities for the browser. Peter Kasting, another Chrome programmer, offered his personal wish list: "I'm more interested in history/visited link/omnibox syncing than bookmarks," he said in a posting. Synchronizing those elements would mean one instance of Chrome would behave more like another, for example being able to retrieve more easily the address of a Web site that a user already visited on another computer.

But the high-powered infrastructure raises some interesting possibilities in the long run. Who needs a hyper-responsive utility just for synchronizing bookmarks or browser history lists? When was the last time you were saving bookmarks so fast that there was a danger multiple updates would run afoul of each other?

The thought I had is that perhaps Chrome OS could benefit from a high-speed message-passing interface. After all, on Chrome OS, Chrome gets the glamorous job of running the Web applications, with the underlying Linux operating system handling more mundane hardware duties.

Perhaps there are situations in which sending lots of XMPP messages could help Google-hosted applications stay in tune with each other. Google Wave, which uses XMPP already to power its group-chat abilities, is one example that springs to mind. Today that's a Web application that doesn't need a browser to handle that lower-level interaction, but might it work better if it were built in? Gmail can use IMAP to keep the same inbox synchronized among different computers, but maybe this would be easier and faster?

Then again, as Freud said, sometimes a train is just a train.

Personal bookmarking service Read It Later has some nice new features this week for both users and developers.

On the user side, there's now an updated version of its reading application for the iPhone, which lets users access their saved reading list even when they're not near a data connection. The new version supports both password-protected sites and articles that are spread out over multiple pages. Once you've plugged in your password to a site that needs it, the app stores the password so you don't have to enter it each time the app needs to fetch a full article. And for stories that span multiple pages, the application will automatically detect this and download the content from the remaining pages.

Other small tweaks include an easier way to turn the auto-ration lock on and off, a currently-reading and recently-read list, as well as a scroll bar that lets you quickly jump to a later part of an article without having to do the Running Man with your fingers. It even shows you how far you've scrolled down in any given article, so you can hop back to where you were. These are small touches, but they can speed up how you navigate to and from each piece of content.

For developers, the service has updated its API to allow third parties to pull user data. Previously they could only write to it. This could make for some exciting apps in the future; one being a version of the software that can download article data in the background, even when you're not running it. As it stands with Read It Later for the iPhone, it can't download new article data for offline reading until the next time you launch it and have a data connection. Other platforms that allow background processes may see richer, fuller apps because of this.

Some of Read It Later's new iPhone features in screenshot form. Click to see in full-size.

(Credit: CNET)

Mozilla has fixed a number of security holes and made some stability improvements to the public version of Firefox. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Firefox 3.0.11 also addresses a specific bug that would corrupt a user's bookmarks database.

According to the Bugzilla report, the corrupted bookmark database was the most common bug reported via Live Chat and in the Firefox support forum.

The security patches in v3.0.11 fix a hole in a JavaScript chrome execution along with other arbitrary code executions, URL spoofing, and memory corruption. The full list of security fixes can be read here, and the release notes are available here.

Read It Later (download), the bookmarking meets productivity tool has a new iPhone app out (review it). It lets you sync up with your desktop reading list and pick up stories while away from your computer. But the real reason to get it, is that like the desktop version it lets you save stories for offline reading, giving you a way to catch up on content even when you're away from a sturdy data connection.

There's both a free and pro version. The pro version, which costs $2.99, adds in things like a bookmarklet for saving links from Safari, a sharing tool to post articles to external bookmarking sites, as well as a full screen browsing mode that gives you more screen real estate than you get in Safari. You can also set it to ignore the iPhone's accelerometer, which lets you read certain content sideways or upside down which can be useful for things like photos.

Here's a demo:

The company also recently released an API for developers to build Read It Later integration into their own apps. This means developers of RSS readers, or even news publishers could give readers who are also Read It Later users a way to save their content for later viewing.

Social bookmarking site Magnolia, which suffered an extensive data loss last week, has posted a new update that says attempts at restoring user data have been unsuccessful. The site continues to be offline while repairs are made--a process Magnolia founder Larry Haff tells us is still ongoing.

Since last week he's been in touch with a handful of other services that might be able to do something with the data that's left. One of those places is Diigo, where Haff is encouraging users to begin a "new collection."

Haff is also pointing users toward tools that, for some, will let them grab a portion of their bookmarks for safe keeping. Magnolia users who are also using FriendFeed can pull in previously bookmarked pages using an officially sanctioned tool that crawls that RSS feed and spits out a stream of bookmarks. However, the tool does not pull in tags or descriptions that were created by users. It also will only go so far back as to when the user had signed up with FriendFeed, a service which is a little over a year old.

A second option that's not nearly as automated as the FriendFeed tool, but can go back further is Web caching. User pages that were picked up by Google and Archive.org can let users view their bookmarks pages and copy over links they had saved. These caches have the added benefit of the tags and descriptions--the two things the FriendFeed tool can't grab. Missing, however, is the option to take the cache and turn it into a quick RSS feed, which would make it simpler to import into another service.

Another side effect of the outage is that paying premium members of the service are being refunded their money in the next two weeks. The two levels of premium membership, which cost $8 and $25 a year respectively, removed ads from Magnolia's bookmark pages and groups. Assuming the site comes back if the data is eventually restored, users might be able to sign up for the service yet again.

Joshua Schachter, the founder of Yahoo's Delicious social-bookmarking service who left the company last June, has taken a new job at Google.

In an e-mail interview, Schachter said he's started work at the rival Internet company but doesn't yet know what he'll be working on. He's a a member of Google's technical staff, according to his LinkedIn profile.

TechCrunch reported the new hire Monday after First Round Capital Managing Director Josh Kopelman mentioned the job in a Twitter posting.

Schacter created Delicious to help manage bookmarks he posted at an earlier site, the once entertaining but now dormant collection of links at Memepool, and continued to work on the project after Yahoo acquired it, so he's got plenty of experience with the concept of bookmarks. Perhaps he's just the fellow to help spruce up Google Bookmarks--or perhaps he'd rather try something new for a change.

Firefox extension Site Launcher (download) lets you replace your bookmarks toolbar with an overlay window of links that can be pulled up at any time using a simple keyboard shortcut. You pick which sites you want on the list, and a one-letter keyboard shortcut is given to each. When pulled up, you simply hit the key for the site you want and it goes straight to it. Once you've memorized which sites are on your list, you can make use of an alternate key combination that lets you skip to each site without having to view the menu at all.

The extension comes with a handful of popular sites built in, although you can also start from scratch with your own. You also have several color and menu style options including setting the maximum number of columns you want, and how transparent the window is.

If you're a laptop or Netbook user looking to get the convenience of a bookmarks toolbar without sucking up the screen real estate, this is a great way to save some space.

Here's a quick demo video of how it works: