BookmarkSync

» see bookmarksync.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 1999 my bookmarks lived in exactly one place, a Favorites folder on one Windows machine in Turkey, at the end of a 33.6k dial-up connection. From around 2002 a lot of my browsing moved into internet cafes, and there the machine you sat at was never the machine you sat at last time. Whatever was in Favorites belonged to the previous customer. Anything you wanted to keep, you either remembered or you typed again.

BookmarkSync sold the obvious fix to that. A small client sat in the system tray, watched your bookmarks for changes, and pushed them up to a central server so the set followed you to any computer. It handled Internet Explorer and Netscape first, then picked up the browsers that arrived later, and it shipped in half a dozen languages with local backup and restore. It was free. The company behind it was SyncIT.com Inc., founded in November 1998 by Michael Berneis and Terence Way, with the site live by March 1999 and the first Internet Archive capture dated 8 May that year.

In September 2003 a server failure ended the original operation. Rather than rebuild, the owners opened the source up, and the brand passed to a single operator named Jhas Dean, who ran it alongside a sibling site called Sync2It. That is the point where BookmarkSync stops being a company and becomes a thing that keeps running.

~ the dossier ~

~ the second server ~

What followed was twenty-one years of a service nobody was really developing. The last stable Windows client, version 3.0.0, is dated August 2010. The Mac client never got past 1.0.4, released on 14 September 2005. The open-source project the 2003 failure produced had quietly ceased to exist by 2022, and the Wikipedia article covering all of this carries a warning that it lacks sufficient citations, which is the usual state of the record for software this small.

The domain kept serving a page the whole time. Archived captures return a working 200 as late as 18 September 2024, with a revisit record on Christmas Day that year. Then on 23 February 2025 the crawler starts collecting a Cloudflare 522, connection timed out to the origin, and from that point the record holds nothing but 522 and 523. Somewhere in that winter the machine behind the name stopped answering and nobody announced it.

~ the problem that solved itself ~

BookmarkSync was not undone by a competitor so much as by the browsers themselves. Firefox shipped Weave and then Sync, Chrome tied bookmarks to a Google account from early on, and Xmarks spent years doing this as an actual business before LastPass bought it in 2010, after which LogMeIn retired it on 1 May 2018. Once the browser syncs for free and the phone holds the same set, a tray application watching a Favorites folder has nothing to do.

~ what it pointed at ~

Request bookmarksync.com today and the answer is a 302 to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BookmarkSync. Somebody still holding the domain, after the server was gone, pointed it at the encyclopedia entry describing what used to be there. It is the cheapest possible memorial and a surprisingly dignified one, given the alternatives available to an expired domain.

Sync2It, the sibling, answers with a 302 of its own and has done since at least 2021. Between the two of them there is no service left, only forwarding.

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