I’ve more or less converted to a Mac fanboy these days, but I still have a PC in my home office that I use for those programs that will only run on Windows (full disclosure: games, for the most part), and just the other night, with some time to kill, I sat down at my old faithful PC and fired up Firefox. I clicked on my browser bookmarks menu, and out popped a huge, convoluted list of sites I used to think were important.

Rhyolite Ghost Town

Past bookmarks revisited

I visited a bunch of them: some were sites that I hadn’t visited in years, some were sites that hadn’t been updated in years, some didn’t even belong to working domain names anymore. Two or three, I admit, were gems that I shouldn’t have forgotten about. But the vast majority were simply not important to me any longer.

What changed

Why? Well, there are a few low-hanging reasons why. For one, there are subscription options available to us nowadays that weren’t available a few years ago. With spiffy, well-managed subscribe-by-RSS and subscribe-by-email, new content from your favorite sites comes to you instead of you having to search for it. I haven’t bookmarked a blog in a long time — if it’s worth reading regularly, it’s worth subscribing to.

Social media has also impacted my bookmarking habits. New, interesting content is streaming through my Twitter and Facebook feeds at mind-numbing speed. I don’t have to surf the web for interesting stories; I can sit back and let interesting, peer-reviewed content wash over me.

Also, even though I regret it every time I clear my cache, I rely quite heavily on my browser’s auto-complete functionality. If I sort of remember the name of the site I’m looking for, I can start typing it into my browser’s address bar and let the browser do the rest of the remembering for me. Even if I don’t remember the site name, I can start typing in some relevant keywords, and, if they’re in the title of one of the site’s pages I’ve visited, I’ll get satisfaction from auto-complete as well. Even when I clear my browser’s cache, Google’s auto-complete comes to the rescue. I never have to remember the URL of my favorite local restaurant — all I have to do is start typing in the restaurant’s name and Google figures out the URL for me.

Ulysses notes

What didn’t change

So what sorts of things are still worth bookmarking for me? Mostly my bookmark list gets filled with temporary placeholders. (Interestingly, isn’t this what a bookmark is supposed to be? You keep it in a book you’re currently reading, at a place you might want to revisit in the near future. When you’re done with the book, you take out any and all bookmarks and put them near the next book in your queue.) If I’m comparing pre-amps for music recording, I’ll surf to a bunch of equipment sites and bookmark pages that are relevant to my quest. Similarly, I’ll bookmark third-party reviews of the equipment, and online shopping sites that carry it. But once I make a decision to buy one of these pre-amps, all of these bookmarks become irrelevant.

The next evolution

Perhaps a scratch pad, project-based bookmark approach would be of value (calling all developers…), wherein you could set up a project in your browser (e.g., “shopping for a pre-amp”), and drag and drop URLS and snippets from your research into that project. When the project is over, you could archive it for posterity, or, if you’re like me and finding that historical bookmarks are just a resource waste, you could simply delete it.

Some developers are actually getting close to this. A new version of the social bookmarking site Delicious has been announced, to mixed reviews. Meanwhile GimmeBar and Zootool both provide online services that allow you to organize your bookmarks in unique ways. I’ll be test-driving them both, and will report back with my experiences.

Bookmarks are dead. Long live bookmarks!