Access Bookmarks from Anywhere with Foxmarks
Browser Add-on Syncs Bookmarks Across Multiple Computers
Mar 9, 2009
"We’re seeing an industry-wide phenomenon of consumers using more than one computer. With the ‘netbook’ era upon us, more and more people have a need to stay in sync as they access the Web across multiple devices," said Foxmarks Inc. CEO, James Joaquin, on his blog.
All browsers today come with some sort of bookmarking feature to manage a list of frequented sites, however, there is one problem: the bookmarks are locked on one computer. Luckily there is Foxmarks, a web browser add-on that automatically synchronizes a user’s bookmarks on the Internet so that they can be accessed from any computer.
Setting Up Foxmarks in a Flash
Foxmarks makes it easy to manage bookmarks across multiple computers and setup only takes a few moments. In Firefox, it is available through the Mozilla Add-on website and it installs very quickly. The setup will first ask the user to create a Foxmarks account with a username and password. The second part of the initial setup will ask the user to synchronize Firefox's bookmarks onto Foxmarks' server, creating two sets of bookmarks. Once the bookmarks are uploaded to the user's account, the setup is complete.
From now on, the user's bookmarks are automatically updated. This means when a user bookmarks a new website, the list on the Foxmarks server is automatically updated to match the list on the computer. Foxmarks works silently in the background to make sure that the computer bookmarks are in sync with the server bookmarks.
How to Access Bookmarks on Multiple Computers
There are two ways by which a user's bookmarks can be accessed on another computer. The easiest and most convenient way is to have Foxmarks installed on every computer. Using Firefox, one can simply begin typing the name of the bookmark in the address bar and it will appear in the drop-down list. After bookmarking a journal article on a laptop at school for example, a student can later access the bookmarked article at home to finish reading it.
Users also have the choice of logging onto my.foxmarks.com and browsing through their most recent list of bookmarks. From here they can also organize the bookmarks into folders and add tags to them to classify them into different categories.
More from Foxmarks
The latest update to Foxmarks added a Suggested Tags feature which recommends tags to a new bookmark. After analyzing millions of bookmarks that users have added, Foxmarks has been able to observe how people categorize their favourite sites. Therefore, suggested tags are based on what others have tagged for the same website. Another optional feature is the password sync which securely stores login information across multiple computers. Also, Foxmarks lets users create certain profiles separating different kinds of bookmarks, such as work, school, or personal bookmarks.
After receiving a huge amount of user feedback, Foxmarks is now available for Internet Explorer, Safari 3 (and Safari Public Beta 4), and will be compatible for Google Chrome in the near future. Joaquin has also announced on his blog that Foxmarks software will be rebranded under the 'Xmarks' name though it will not affect performance of the existing Foxmarks add-on.
The add-on for Firefox, and other browsers, is available here.
