Just when we all thought we’d never see it again, the cross-browser bookmark syncing service Xmarks has received a life-saving injection.

The company has been acquired by LastPass, maker of a cross-browser password manager and form filler add-on. The deal was announced Thursday, and terms were not disclosed.

Xmarks will live on as a freemium service. The initial cross-browser syncing tool you’re already familiar with will be free, but users will be encouraged to upgrade to a paid subscription to unlock more advanced features. It’s the same model employed by LastPass for its own Premium version of its (otherwise free) password-syncing service.

Xmarks Premium will be offered for $1 per month ($12 per year) and it comes with some new features like apps for the iPhone and Android phones, and technical support. You will also be able to bundle the premium offerings from LastPass and Xmarks together for $20 per year.

There’s already an iPhone app for Xmarks, and the company just recently released an Android app, too. Xmarks says anyone currently using the iPhone app can continue to use it without upgrading to the premium service, but they will have to buy in to the $12 per year plan to get future upgrades.

It looked like curtains for Xmarks in September, when the company announced it would shut down its service in early 2011.

Apparently, there’s no money in a free bookmark syncing service, and the company was facing new competition from the cloud-based syncing systems being built into Firefox and Chrome. Even though Xmarks one-ups those built-in single-browser services by syncing bookmarks across all your browsers, it couldn’t stay afloat.

The service has some 4.5 million users, and there was an outcry when Xmarks announced the shutdown. Later, the company asked its fans if they would be willing to pay a subscription fee to keep Xmarks alive. Over 30,000 of them pledged to do so, and that was enough to attract the attention of LastPass.

The two companies will continue to operate under independent brands, though they may merge everything later.

So, it turns out this dark story of cloud computing had a silver lining after all.

See also:

• Xmarks to Continue Syncing Bookmarks, Thanks to Loyal Fans
• Xmarks Mulls Switch to Premium Service
• Popular Bookmark Syncing Tool XMarks to Shut Down
• Xmarks Syncs Open Tabs Across Browsers, iPhone

Xmarks has a new lease on life thanks to the support of its most vocal users.

The free bookmark syncing service had previously announced it was shutting down, but vocal customers signed an online pledge last week promising to pay for a premium version of the service. This made the company take a second look at its options.

Now, according to a new post on the Xmarks blog, it looks like the service itself will continue, even though the company behind Xmarks may still be doomed.

In a new blog post thanking users for their outspoken support, Xmarks CEO James Joaquin, says “Xmarks now has multiple offers from companies ready and willing to take over the service and keep making browser sync better.”

Although Joaquin cautions that no deal has yet been signed, he seems confident that one will emerge in the near future: “With multiple offers on the table we’re pretty confident that Xmarks will continue on with no service interruption,” he says.

That’s good news for the some two million users who rely on Xmarks to sync bookmarks and open tabs between web browsers like Google Chrome, IE, Safari, Firefox, as well as mobile devices.

Many of the users have already but their money where their mouth is — or at least pledged to put their money where their mouth is — using Xmarks’ PledgeBank page to promise their support for a premium version of the service. That’s no doubt had a positive effect on Xmarks perceived value and convinced at least a few companies that service might be worth buying.

See Also:

• Xmarks Mulls Switch to Premium Service
• Popular Bookmark Syncing Tool Xmarks to Shut Down
• Xmarks Syncs Open Tabs Across Browsers, iPhone
• Mozilla Gets Ready to Weave Syncing Into Firefox

The free, cross-browser, cross-platform bookmarking sync service XMarks is shutting its doors. Despite some 2 million users, the company has never found a way to make money and can no longer afford to continue.

XMarks will continue to function for another three months — until January 10, 2011 — after which the service will pull the plug, the company says in a blog post. There is no real replacement for XMarks, though the company has set a up page to help users migrate away from from XMarks which lists a few suggestions, like Evernote and Sugarsync.

XMarks started as a Firefox extension for syncing bookmarks between your various Firefox installations. The company then expanded to work with Google Chrome, IE and Safari, keeping all of those browsers in perfect sync.

Earlier this year the company added another very useful feature that syncs your open tabs between browsers (and even your phone, thanks to the web-based interface).

Unfortunately, despite an incredibly useful set of features, XMarks never found a way to make money. Todd Agulnick, co-founder and CTO, writes on the company’s blog that XMarks was always “predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service.”

Agulnick recounts several of XMarks attempts to make a profit, including a smart search tool based on anonymized data from the over 100 million bookmarks stored on its servers. While the search tool “turned out amazing results” writes Agulnick, it only worked well for certain types of queries and was “terrible at finding facts.”

Sadly, a business model for XMarks never emerged and, faced with rising hosting costs and expenses, XMarks has decided to shut down.

Perhaps part of the reason for XMarks demise is that Firefox and Chrome have both added their own bookmark syncing systems to the browser itself, eliminating the need for an add-on. Mozilla has built its Sync service directly into the latest versions of Firefox (including the nascent mobile version) and Google Chrome can now sync your settings to any installation of Chrome using your Google account. Safari’s syncing is handled by MobileMe.

Now, if XMarks were to try charging for its services, it would be competing against free tools that don’t require any effort on the users part.

Of course, no browser vendor makes a syncing tool that syncs data between web browsers like XMarks did. That’s a feature, for those of us that used it heavily, that will be sorely missed.

See Also:

• Xmarks Syncs Open Tabs Across Browsers, iPhone
• Mozilla Gets Ready to Weave Syncing Into Firefox
• New Firefox Designs Rethink Browser Bookmarks
• Opera Link Connects Your Bookmarks Across Browsers

When I was a nipper with a Commodore 64, there was a brief mania for things like Pinball Construction Set, Adventure Construction Set, and Garry Kitchen’s GameMaker, which allowed patient amateurs to piece together their own clumsy game creations without having to learn a word of assembly or even BASIC. In those days, we had plenty of free time, since the web hadn’t been booted up yet (although I ran a BBS on dial-up, with an average uptime of three hours per day).

Nowadays, of course, we spend all our waking hours in massively multiplayer virtual interactions, commenting on each other’s profiles and collaboratively filtering each other’s kitten photos. And naturally, a new set of construction sets has arisen to correspond with the latest hobbies. Ning was co-founded by Marc Andreessen (is he still a household name in the Web 2.x era?) in secrecy and dramatically unveiled a few months ago. It’s a meta-application that lets would-be webpreneurs make their own social web apps.

Have you ever admired Craigslist but just wished that the ads were collaboratively filtered a la Digg? Or thought OKCupid just needs mapping, video, and live searching to be truly great? Now’s your chance to put your brilliant ideas in front of a web-hungry world without the bother of looking for investors, designing shoddy classes and whatever else typically goes into making a hot-shot social web application.

In practice, Ning handles a lot of the aspects of web apps that are tedious to code oneself — user authentication and data structures, for example. This leaves you, the creative genius, free to plunge right into what you do best. Is it an idea the world’s been waiting for? Let’s take a look at how to get started Ninging it up.

Rhythm-a-Ning

Step one is to download and install the — wait, no! I’m too used to typing that by reflex after a million of these articles. In Ning’s brave new world, the first step is to go to Ning.com and create an account, which involves both a CAPTCHA and waiting 30 minutes or so for e-mail confirmation. (Ning is faintly beta in several ways, not least its slow servers: When the welcome e-mail arrives, it’s from ""Ning"".) Once you’re signed up and logged in, go to the Developers tab and give a click where it says “Click here to change your profile to Developer Settings and get direct access to more of the things you care about.” That switches the interface to a less beginner-friendly, more developer-friendly version of the site.

As with any good DIY project, you can start making your new social Web app by copying what someone else has already done. Ning allows you to clone an existing app to use as a starting point for your own. Depending on how ambitious you are, at this point you could just slap a new graphic on and call it yours, or completely rework it bit by bit. Ning also lets you view anybody’s app source code (all PHP for now; Ruby is promised as an alternative soon), unless they’ve paid to become a premium member, among the perks of which is code concealment. So it’s not too hard to dive in and start tweaking an app you like. We’re going to create our own from near-scratch.

The Ning gnomes provide a number of custom PHP classes, both for interacting with the database and for quickly adding sprinkles of Ajax, web services, and other treats to an application. There’s a lot there, and plumbing all of Ning’s continually growing possibilities is a big job, but here’s a run-through a very basic app; say a bookmark manager. We’ll get some information from the user, store it and show it to them when they return.

Mark Those Books

We create a new app using the “Create a New App” button, give it a name and a myfabulousapp.ning.com URL, along with optional classification tags, and we are rolling. Like a newly created adventurer setting out from the Guild, each brand-new app has a couple of items in its pack: a magical logo GIF, a global header, some default CSS for the road, and, of course, its trusty index.php. This comes from the factory with some preset code to display a greeting to any wayward user who comes across it:

<?php

 $viewer = XN_Profile::current();

 $name = ($viewer->isLoggedIn() ? $viewer->screenName : 'Stranger');

 ...

 <h3>Hello, <?php echo $name; ?>!</h3>



     <?php if ($viewer->isOwner()) { ?>

         Come on in, the code's nice and warm...

     <?php } else { ?>

         This App is still under development.  Please check back later.



     <?php } ?>



 

The first lines do some initializing. XN_Profile::current(); returns an object with information about the user who’s viewing the page (or an empty object if it’s not a logged-in user), including the properties interrogated in the second line: the isLoggedIn() method and the screenName constant. Then, below, the $name variable is used to greet the user by name, and the isOwner() method tests for the special circumstance in which the user is the app’s creator.

Let’s delete that starter code though and move on to our app. We’ll need a form in which the user can input his or her favorite bookmarks.

<form name="bookmarker" method="POST" action="index.php">



 Name: <input type="text" name="name"> <br/>

 URL: <input type="text" name="URL"> <br/>



 Description: <input type="text" name="description"> <br/>



 <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Bookmark!">

 </form>



 

Meanwhile (actually, let’s put this next part at the top of the page), we add the submitted bookmark to the database:

<?php

 if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {



 $bookmark = XN_Content::create('Bookmark')

      ->my->add('name',$_POST['name'])

      ->my->add('url',$_POST['URL'])

      ->my->add('desc',$_POST['description'])

       ->save();

 }?>



  

Let’s look at that. The first line is familiar PHP: Since the form submits to index.php, the same page it’s on, we want to run our post-submission code only if something’s been submitted, not every time the page loads. That’s line one. The next part uses the create method of Ning’s built-in XN_Content class to create a new bookmark object. The my->add syntax adds attributes that are localized to this particular object, necessary since there are doubtless other Bookmark objects in the Ning-wide data store. Finally save() places the info in the database.

Get used to that chaining syntax, since Ning likes to do things that way.

A query, sir

A similar approach is used to extract and display the bookmarks the user has stored.

$marks = XN_Query::create("Content")

 	->filter('owner')

 	->filter('contributor','=',XN_Profile::current())

 	->execute();



  

We construct a query with the XN_Query class. We apply two filters to the query. The first one, by owner, limits our results to content created by this application. The second one compares the contributor, aka the user, to XN_Profile::current(), which as you recall from above is the object representing the logged-in user. Hence, each user only sees his or her own bookmarks. Hey, delete that line and you’ve got del.icio.us!

Finally execute() executes our query and stores the resulting array in $marks. We’ll then do a loop through $marks and display each bookmark in a nice classy HTML table. For that, we chain again: $mark->my->htmlentities(name) runs the htmlentities() method on the my->name attribute of $mark, thereby making it display nicely.

The code for the whole page is thus:

<?php

 if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {

 	$bookmark = XN_Content::create('Bookmark')

 		->my->add('name',$_POST['name'])

 		->my->add('url',$_POST['URL'])

 		->my->add('desc',$_POST['description'])

 		->save();

 }

 ?>

 <h3>Your Bookmarks</h3>



 <table>



 <tr><th align="left">Name</th>

 <th align="left">URL</th>

 <th align="left">Description</th></tr>



 <?php

 $marks = XN_Query::create("Content")

 	->filter('owner')

 	->filter('contributor','=',XN_Profile::current())

 	->execute();

 foreach ($marks as $mark) {

 echo "<tr><td>";

 echo $mark->my->htmlentities(name);

 echo "</td><td>";

 echo '<a href="' . $mark->my->htmlentities(url) . '">' . $mark->my->htmlentities(url) . '</a>';

 echo "</td><td>";

 echo $mark->my->htmlentities(desc);

 echo "</td></tr>";

 }

 ?>



 </table>



 <form name="bookmarker" method="POST" action="index.php">

 Name: <input type="text" name="name"> <br/>

 URL: <input type="text" name="URL"> <br/>



 Description: <input type="text" name="description"> <br/>



 <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Bookmark!">

 </form>



  

You can paste that into a Ning app of your own and play around with it.

That’s just a scratch of Ning’s surface. There’s a lot to work with, and the documentation is skimpy at times, so using a pre-existing app as a springboard for yours is not a bad idea.

In addition to PHP and the forthcoming Ruby, you can use something called XNHTML, which is Ning’s own sort of templating-tag pre-processed way of doing things. Or, if you don’t like coding at all, there’s Zoho Creator, a newer, simpler meta-application that supports cloning too, or lets one create a whole mouseovery, tag-cloudy, Ajaxy app just by pointing and clicking.

Have fun!

I noticed this same self-linking when I was researching the 8 Simple Tools for Better Bookmarking. Several of the sites, which aimed to generate discussion about the bookmarks, forced users to first visit a comment and meta-data page. For example, here’s an intermediate page on Twine:

I got to this page from a web industry twine. I chose the story from a list of other links by clicking its headline. I expected the headline to go to the original article, not this overview page. I’m not denying that such a page has value. It provides a good summary and a place to discuss the article. But many users will want to read the original before reading or writing comments.

It takes an extra effort for me to click through to the intermediate page, then find the full link way down the page. Worse, it breaks my expectations.

Twine is not the only one with this issue. Social bookmarking site Clipmarks and developer site dzone link to an intermediate page. Diigo links to itself only from front page stories.

Each of these services may have a perfectly good reason for self-linking. If the purpose is to encourage users to participate in discussion, this is the wrong way to to it. Consider the popular communities of Digg and Reddit, where comments for each entry thrive despite not linking as obviously to the internal page.

The headline links to the article, as expected, but there’s always the “comments” link if the user has something to say, or wants to read the discussion. One reason Digg and Reddit have a community may be because they don’t stand in the way of users and the content that the community gathers around. Let your users out of your box. Tear down the walls and don’t force them into internal pages. You may just see better results.

[Disclosure: Reddit is owned by CondeNet, the parent company of Webmonkey and Wired.]

See also:

• ‘Roach Motel’ Links Threaten to Undermine Web Foundations
• Digg Links Bring Free Access to Wall Street Journal Content
• Google Requests No Funny Stuff With Dynamic URLs

Over the last week, I’ve been checking out some new tools for social bookmarking and looking back at some old favorites. A lot has changed in the two years since our social bookmarking showdown. Users expect more than just saving bookmarks. We want to share them with friends, put them on our blog, and incorporate them into the other tools we use every day.

Before we get to the list of tools, here is the criteria I used to rate them:

• It can quickly store my bookmarks — get in and get out.
• It provides ways for me to share and syndicate my bookmarks.
• It archives the page, or the portion that is of most interest to me.
• It helps me discover new content.

Best bookmarking tool: Ma.gnolia – An old-timer of social bookmarking, Ma.gnolia has continued to innovate. Its API has led to several applications and the open sourcing of its code could lead to many more. You can add or join groups, which maintain collections of links on shared interest topics. As always, Ma.gnolia looks nice and it’s easy to use quickly. There’s only one other tool I looked at that saves the entire page, something Ma.gnolia has done for some time.

Best new bookmarking tool: Diigo – Though intended as a group research tool, Diigo works just as well when used on its own. It has a bookmarklet that can be used in any browser, but its main use is as a browser toolbar for Firefox and IE. In addition to normal bookmarking, you can highlight text and add floating “sticky notes” to the page. This sounds like additional fluff that can get in the way of quick use, but it is remarkably fast and later lets you view just your highlighted text. Since it is meant for collaboration, it has great group features, which can help you discover new content or fellow users.

Read my full review of Diigo.

The remaining six tools are displayed in alphabetical order.

Clipmarks may be the most social tool I reviewed in the Better Bookmarking series. You can follow others, similar to Twitter. Then you receive a stream of the latest content shared by those you follow. Like a couple other tools I looked at, Clipmarks lets you highlight the text or images of most interest to you. That makes for a livelier stream than just a list of links. Plus, Clipmarks packages everything in a chrome that, while sometimes slow, can be added as a widget anywhere on the web.

Read my full review of Clipmarks.

Delicious is the granddaddy of social bookmarking. It’s still super fast and has some admirable tools for sharing and syndicating. Outside of a recent redesign, not much has changed since Yahoo bought the site in 2005. That means it hasn’t become worse or better. Enough people still use it that it’s still useful for getting a feel for what’s popular.

Friendfeed is a popular newcomer that some might not even call a bookmarking tool. Its core functionality is to combine your many feeds from various websites into one location. Additionally, the service lets you inject links directly into your single feed and each item has its own comment thread. Add to that topic-driven public and private rooms, and Friendfeed has many of the features I’d want in a bookmarking tool.

Iterasi is a Firefox extension for saving entire pages, not just bookmarking. It still meets many of the criteria I outlined above. If you don’t want to enter details, you can quickly save a page with a single click. Plus, it has many sharing and syndication features, my favorite of which might be embedding an archived page within another page.

Read my full review of Iterasi.

Snipd is a brand new tool from this summer’s Y-combinator funding. It’s short a few of the criteria, but it performs its core functionality beautifully. Snipd uses a bookmarklet that lets you highlight pieces of content — text, images and even videos. The outcome is a stream of content that looks like it took more than a few clicks to create. I’d like to see more social features and an API, but this is an awesome tool for a summer’s worth of work.

Read my full review of Snipd.

Twine is the first product from a well-funded company working hard on the Semantic Web, which helps make information equally understandable by machines and humans. You can use Twine to bookmark, but the real power comes from its interest groups on the site, where you can discover new content and people with similar interests. If Twine’s trajectory continues, I’d expect to see them top this list next year. One feature I’d love to see is text highlighting. Why not just buy Snipd?

Read my full review of Twine.

Like Diigo, Twine is organized into interest groups, which it calls twines. Though the service is in private beta, there have already been 17,000 twines created. The top 100 tilt toward technology.

Behind the scenes, Twine tries to make sense of the items shared with it. Where it can, it adds tags of its own, and categorizes places, people, and organizations as best it can. The attached screenshot is from a bookmark announcing the SXSW conference. The orange links were added by Twine.

Most of what is added to Twine are bookmarks, that is not all it takes. You can attached documents in the web interface or via email. Twine also distinguishes images and videos from standard web links. Lastly, you can create original content with a rich text editor. Twine’s CEO Nova Spivack eats a little of his own dog food by blogging with Twine.

When anything is added to Twine, it defaults to private, unless you choose to share it with one of your twines or a friend who you’ve added as a connection. There is not another way to flip a bookmark from private to public, though that feature is in the works. The current solution is to create a Twine specifically for your public bookmarks.

Nova Spivack shared his vision for Twine with Webmonkey:

“Where other bookmarking tools let you add some tags and description, we’re taking your bookmarks and turning them into a knowledge base… we want to be the smartest tool for social bookmarking.”

Twine is useful at several levels. It is a place to hold bookmarks (you can import from Delicious to get started), a site to share information with others, and a way to discover content. An upcoming version of Twine will have full text indexing of links, though I’d also like to see them add Snipd-like highlighting. Twine will also release an API at the beginning of 2009.

The future of Twine, Spivack said, is part user-facing website and part framework to build on top of. Maybe that’s why they’ve raised nearly $20 million and some have said the company behind Twine could be worth $1 billion. The concepts behind Twine are moving into the Semantic Web, which helps make information equally understandable by machines and humans. Tim Berners-Lee sees that as the future.

Twine is currently in private beta, but Webmonkey has invites for our readers. If you’d like one, you can find my email address in the sidebar.

See also:

• Better Bookmarking Series
• Inching Toward a Semantic Web
• Firefox 3 To Support Microformats

When you use the Diigo toolbar, you enter comments and other text into a browser interface (a pop-up bookmark form, or the Diigo sidebar). The process of “annotating” a page feels fast, because most of the work happens in your browser.

Everything you enter is stored on Diigo’s servers. Everything you enter is available to other Diigo users, unless you choose to make it private, or only available to friends. That annotations are public means that Diigo is a good research tool, even without people you know using it. The Diigo public groups feature is a way to find topics that are of interest to you.

Where I Diigo would be most useful is with a group of people researching together (or friends who enjoy sharing sarcastic comments line by line, like a textual Mystery Science Theater for the web). Though I cannot imagine giving up the horizontal space of browsing with the toolbar open, giving it a try does change the browsing experience. Diigo does not require you to keep the toolbar open, but doing so lets you discover other Diigo users’ takes on the current site you’re viewing. For example, I learned that comments about YouTube are only slightly better than YouTube comments themselves.

I have some issues with the Diigo defaults. The toolbar takes up most of an entire horizontal bar in Firefox, with a dozen buttons when it installs. Saving a page is split amongst four of those buttons, including individual interfaces for bookmarking, highlighting, and commenting. Also, be sure to check your Diigo settings. There are seven different email choices, most of which default to send you messages.

Though I’m impressed with the speed and usefulness of Diigo as a toolbar, I might choose the lighter bookmarklet over the feature-heavy version. It can be used in many of the same ways, but only activates when I ask it to.

[Diagram courtesy of Diigo]

See also:

• Better Bookmarking Series
• Better Bookmarking: Snipd
• Better Bookmarking: Clipmarks

The process of clipping information feels a little slower than other services. To add a comment or tags, you need to wait for a pop-up window to load. I expect a Firefox extension to use a non-web interface. All the functionality of Clipmarks seems possible via a bookmarklet, which could then be used in other browsers.

The real fun of Clipmarks comes from consuming others’ clips. You can follow users, similar to Twitter. Then those you follow are called “guides” and you can see a stream of the latest content shared by them.

Browsing clips, with its chrome-y interface, also feels a little slow. Luckily, Clipmarks has a wealth of RSS feeds. Following individual people or all your guides through an external reader is easy.

Connecting to other services is another area where Clipmarks really shines. Give it your Delicious or Magnolia credentials and your clips will also be posted to that service. For someone with many links stored on Delicious, it’s nice to know I don’t have to give up my old standby just to enjoy what’s new in bookmarking.

Similarly, you can clip pages directly into a blog post, email to friends, and share your clips in a Flash widget. Despite complaints I’ve had with speed, Clipmarks does get the social part of social bookmarking.

See also:

• Better Bookmarking Series
• Delicious Gets New Look, Loses Dots
• The Social Bookmarking Showdown: Ma.gnolia