Google Bookmarks

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

~ the goodbye ~

google bookmarks was the kind of google product i found by accident around '07 and forgot about after a week. it sat at bookmarks.google.com behind a single sign-in. it was never part of chrome and never absorbed into anything else google ran. it was just a page with a list of urls and labels.

it launched in october '05. google toolbar 4 at the time had a "bookmarks" star button that synced to it, which is how most people first touched it. when chrome arrived in '08, chrome's bookmark sync was a separate system. google bookmarks was already an orphan by the time the browser that should have inherited it shipped.

i was on firefox in '05-'10, then chrome. neither browser ever made google bookmarks the obvious place to put a saved url. delicious had a social layer with public tags. google bookmarks was private and silent, which is the part i actually liked, and also the part that made it invisible inside google's own tools.

the service quietly closed on 30 september '21. google's announcement was short and offered an export to html. there was no replacement. chrome bookmarks already existed and used different conventions. the labels you had built across sixteen years on google bookmarks did not move.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the early-2000s bookmark problem was real. you had a desktop browser at home and maybe a work laptop on weekdays. your saved urls were stuck on whichever browser instance you used last. delicious solved this with public social tags in '03. google bookmarks tried the private version two years later. both got eaten by the browsers themselves shipping cloud sync.

the toolbar context is the one most people forget. google toolbar (in inventory as google-toolbar) was on millions of windows machines through ie 6 and ie 7. the toolbar's "bookmark this page" star wrote to google bookmarks by default. for a brief window around '06-'08, the bookmarks.google.com page was the most-populated bookmark database google had, just because toolbar was everywhere and chrome did not exist yet.

~ the next chapter ~

chrome bookmark sync now does what google bookmarks did, with a different ui and the same sign-in. firefox sync does the same for the other camp. the open-web bookmark idea, the one delicious tried to socialize and google bookmarks tried to privatize, mostly died with the standalone services. the only inheritance is the chrome star button, which technically owes nothing to the bookmarks.google.com page that ran in parallel for thirteen years before chrome ate it.

the strange thing about google bookmarks was its persistence. it outlived google buzz, google wave, google reader, igoogle, and most of the '11 spring cleaning that took out sidewiki and a dozen other utilities. then it took another decade to actually die. the only google product i can think of that lasted longer in a similar zombie state is google groups, and groups is still up.

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