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Google’s New Bookmarking Service, Previously Called Stars, Has Gone Live
- eksith 12y agoThe eager user in me is delighted there's a place to save my bookmarks. The paranoid user is worried Google will have access to my saved sites and sell my usage stats. The nostalgic user is still irritated that Google Reader could have still been saved and this feature appended.
- eli 12y agoGoogle sells targeted ads, not usage data.
- th0br0 12y agoWhere's the difference?
- oneeyedpigeon 12y agoWhether third parties see information about your online behaviour or not. Is that not clear?
- dragonwriter 12y agoIn selling usage data: Someone pays Google, gets your usage data (and can do with it whatever they want). In selling targetted ads: Someone pays Google and gives them a specification of what kind of people they'd like to see the ads, and Google uses the usage data they already have to select who to show the ad to. At the end: In the former case, Google and the third party both have your data. In the latter case, Google has the data, and the third party does not.
- Igglyboo 12y agoThe end goal is the same but the only party with your information is Google as opposed to a third party.
- mike_ivanov 12y agoahem https://developers.google.com/bid-manager/guides/data-transfer/format-v6 https://developers.google.com/bid-manager/guides/data-transf...
- eli 12y agoI'm not sure what you think that page describes, but it's NOT a way to buy data about how a person uses a google product.
- mike_ivanov 12y agoYou see, I know exactly what this page describes ;-)
- Sephr 12y ago> The paranoid user is worried Google will have access to my saved sites and sell my usage stats. Google doesn't have access to your bookmarks if you set your Chrome sync encryption password to something other than your Google password. When first launching the new bookmark manager, you'll even get a privacy message in the manager reminding you that Google does not have access to your custom sync encryption password.
- mimighost 12y agoIt looks like Pocket
- Robadob 12y agoIt looks like a Flat UI version of the chrome web store to me.
- x0x0 12y agoDead pool? Or maybe we should call it a fewer-arrows more-wood pool. Or even "haha you gave us your data" pool. If I were cynical, a "do you dumbasses ever learn" pool. I've got $10 on Oct 2016. A nice round 2 years.
- honzzz 12y agoI used to use Google Notebook and Google Reader. I saved many notes and tagged many articles. Google suddenly discontinued both. I am not going to invest any effort into learning/using any Google service without some assurance that it is going to be supported at least 5 years.
- eksith 12y agoSame here. Notebook was a like a brain dump for me and it saved my bacon quite a few times while pinning research. In fact, when Pinterest came out, I couldn't help but not the similarities (except, of course, for the glaring differences) Notebook was like textual "pinning". It was interesting to go back and see lines of thought in mid progress. Evernote wasn't quite the same for me.
- rikkus 12y agoYep and I used Google Bookmarks too, so that I could get to them from everywhere, but it was dreadful if you had more than a few tags (massive load of HTML loaded for each tag which made a huge tall page) and was clunky. I've moved to pinboard.in (of course).
- sp332 12y agoIt's just a way to manage your bookmarks, right? You can export and import bookmarks pretty easily, and this doesn't change that.
- CitizenKane 12y agoIt's definitely a concern when using some of the more far flung google products that this can happen. My company is developing a similar product (though it's going to be going beyond what is here). We intend to stay in operation for a very long time! It's a product we need ourselves and we pour our blood, sweat, and tears into it. We're in private beta currently and if you'd like to try you can contact me (info is in my profile)!
- wanghq 12y agoFYI, there is a https://www.google.com/bookmarks/ https://www.google.com/bookmarks/ which is a completely different service.
- inthewoods 12y agoWhich they seem to not care about - maybe they'll sunset it and finally force me to do the work to get off the outdated platform.
- greyskull 12y agoWhy wouldn't they merge that with the Chrome bookmark sync? Many years back there used to be a section in Google Docs (I think that's what it was called at the time, well before the switch to Drive) where I could see all of my bookmarks; if I was away from my personal computers, I could still see the links without syncing chrome. I switched to Xmarks just for that feature. Granted, now I always have my phone with me which has the sync. But it still seems odd that they wouldn't give us web access to that data.
- abraham 12y agoThe old Google Bookmarks can't be merged with Chrome bookmark sync because Bookmarks uses tags while Chrome uses folders. The same URLs would end up getting duplicated in several folders.
- dublinben 12y agoThose "bookmarks" mostly appear to be locations I've starred on Google Maps.
- cjoelrun 12y agoI made the mistake of heavily using this after delicious went away (and is now back :S). I'm at a loss at what I should do now.
- mkehrt 12y agoPinboard. It is great.
- Numberwang 12y agoBookmarks seems like an outdated technology. With the resources Google have, it would be cool if they could create a site where you can follow other sites as they update. Perhaps this site could then even differentiate between different 'streams' or 'feeds' from sites. And in this workflow you could add the 'stars' to articles and updates you would find interesting. I hope someday they will create or have this system evolve into something like that, which would be a lot more useful.
- BostonEnginerd 12y agoA great name for this product would be Google Reader!
- grinich 12y agoOr Pinterest...
- senthil_rajasek 12y ago"Bookmarks seems like an outdated technology." Sorry, I disagree. I use this all the time on my phone. Bookmarks allow me to quickly access pages without a lot of typing on my phone.
- flippyhead 12y ago> Bookmarks seems like an outdated technology. I agree. I made http://fetching.io http://fetching.io because I hate having to remember to save something just to easily find it later. Everything you see should be indexed and easily searchable.
- dghughes 12y agoFinally a place to store my 50,000 unsorted bookmarks from the last 20 years :/ As others have said bookmarks seem to have outlived their usefulness, the idea makes sense but managing them is tedious.
- kanzure 12y ago> the idea (bookmarks) makes sense but managing them is tedious What sort of bookmark management tasks do you find yourself spending lots of time or effort on?
- dghughes 12y agoPrimarily categorization and then searching. Trying to make folders to categorize websites but I end up with multiple folders for the same website and the mess grows. The fewer folder categories the better. For my files I try to keep it simple and have just Media, Applications, Documents as the top level folder. Media would break down in to pictures and video then video into TV, movies. Documents and Applications would also break down a bit more. The other problem is the websites I gather tend to get added faster than I can categorize them which is compounded by the multiple category problem. Searching do I search by time or category? Sometimes time is easier if it was recent but then later on, years later, it's easier to search by category. In the end I get frustrated and dump it all into one giant pile probably never to be viewed ever again.
- kanzure 12y agoOh that's interesting, why not just use tags though? One bookmark gets any number of tags, and then you just have to be somewhat consistent about your tag choices. The first few hundred bookmarks are usually tagged poorly, and then after that you get into a consistent naming pattern. https://github.com/davidlazar/jotmuch https://github.com/davidlazar/jotmuch
- dghughes 12y agoI think I've tried tags maybe on bookmarks maybe it was some things else. I am a fan of them maybe I drifted away from them for some reason.
- exhilaration 12y agoWhile this is nice I'd like really like something that will not only save a bookmark to a particular page but a snapshot of it as well - maybe an HTML version but a screenshot or PDF would also be great. That seems to be the kind of problem Google could solve.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoIf Stars has an API, you could do this by kicking off an archive task at the Internet Archive, and replace the bookmark link with the immutable URL from the IA.
- interurban 12y agoPinboard does this IIRC.
- dewey 12y agoIt does and I really like that feature, well worth the money. It's kind of sad if you see the stats on how many of your bookmarked sites are not available any more after a few years.
- simoneau 12y ago"Clip full page" in Evernote Web Clipper does a nice job snapshotting the current page, even if it is behind a login.
- CitizenKane 12y agoMy company is developing a product that does just that. We've been very focused at making bookmarks and links more useful and easier. It's going through a lot of development and currently in a private beta. If you're interested my contact info is in my profile and we're looking for all the feedback we can get. Edit: We're actually also very close to having a pretty good full page archiving solution as well. It's not 100% yet, but there is still a lot of good there already.
- Jyaif 12y agoNot exactly the same thing, but you can save pages to your mobile devices for offline viewing with the Chrome to Mobile extension.
- epaulson 12y agoIf any members of the Google Data Liberation Front are reading HN today, is this on your radar to support? Failing that, any word on an API into the service behind it?
- wiredfool 12y agoIdlewords should budget for a couple new servers in about... 2 years or so?
- Fuzzwah 12y agoI've used a variety of services similar to this over the years; delicious, spurl and currently diigo. My use case works like this: 1) find an interesting website / article 2) highlight a paragraph 3) click the magic button (ie: diigo's chrome extension button) 4) save the url along with the high lighted text and a tag 5) my blog then pulls in this info from my diigo user's rss feed and displays it to visitors I'll be checking out google's effort, but I can't see me moving away from diigo unless I have to.
- vagarwa 12y agowould love to get your comments on our efforts at Surfmark (now focused on education but still open for everyone) required disclaimer: founder, surfmark
- archagon 12y agoThere is no point in betting on something that has a 50/50 chance of disappearing in a few years to store your valuable bookmarks — especially when (I assume) cross-platform support will be lacking. Use Pinboard instead.
- bioinformatics 12y agoMy first thought when I saw the announcement: "When will it be discontinued?"
- notatoad 12y agoUnless you're like me and you don't consider your bookmarks to be very valuable. If google kills it, so be it. In the meantime, it's a one-click add to chrome and it has a prettier interface than the standard bookmarks manager. might as well use it.
- guyzero 12y agoPinboard will be there when the Earth falls into the sun, for sure.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> There is no point in betting on something that has a 50/50 chance of disappearing in a few years to store your valuable bookmarks If its convenient for use now and there is a a very high probability that, if discontinued, there would be a convenient export mechanism and a significant period in which to use it, then even if there is a "50/50 chance of disappearing in a few years", I don't see why it wouldn't be a good place to store bookmarks.
- fwn 12y agoI feel that this "it will disappear" notion right behind every Google announcement slowly tends to get some witty meme. We all know every service will end.
- threeseed 12y agoReally so you expect Google Search or GMail to just wrap up at some point ? Be serious. It is those services from Google that don't contribute to revenue to be wary of.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sferoze 12y agoWhat about the ability to collaborate with other users on a shared bookmark folder? It would be useful if multiple users could add bookmarks to the same shared folder. Also how do I access my bookmarks if I am at a friends house and don't have my computer or phone on me. Do I have to login to my chrome account on their chrome browser? What if they don't have chrome installed? It would be nice if they had a basic website I could access from anyones device, where I could login and view all my bookmarks. I think the auto folders is the most innovative part of the app. I will have to use it more but I feel like I would stop creating folders and just add links.
- CitizenKane 12y agoMy company is making precisely this product. We have a fair amount of work todo, but we have a usable private beta right now. You can't collaborate quite yet, but it's on the horizon. If you'd be interested you can find my contact details in my profile!
- LVB 12y agoI used SiteBar (http://sitebar.org http://sitebar.org) for the shared bookmark folder function about 10 years ago. Still looks the same ;-)
- rgovind 12y agoTangentially related.For long tail queries, Why is there no "research mode" on search engines? Often times, I find myself searching for some term like "Commute Home Traffic app" on app store (For market research purposes). Google, Apple, Bing, all give a huge list of results but I cannot go through them in a single sitting. So, I should keep the window open and keep clicking next occasionally (Spread over multiple days). If I do the same search again, these search engines return same order of results I am unhappy with. Is there no solution to this problem? Can't they remember which results I am not interested in and stop showing them? Can't they let me continue my "research" where I left off from?
- squeaky-clean 12y agoI find in this situation, sifting through more pages doesn't help, you'll need to continually refine your query. There's never been a point where I've gotten to page 2 on Google and thought "This information is good, but I'd like to keep going further to find more." Take the "Commute Home Traffic app" term you provide as an example. Searching for that within the Play store, the results are pretty terrible once you even go as little as scrolling below the fold. The first 10 apps displayed seem somewhat useful, then the next 30 or so are just variations of the same apps but specific to a city. Then beyond that, bus map apps specific to a city, a ride-sharing app, apps specific to news stations, some alarm clocks, etc... It'd be much more beneficial to search with a new term now that we've learned what results we get, instead of looking through 100 more apps. Something like "Commute Traffic San Francisco" or a different query altogether.
- Igglyboo 12y agoI can count on my fingers how many times I've found useful results past the first page of any search engine.
- rgovind 12y agoI often do market research queries. For example, I would like to see if there is an app that focuses on "real estate or home buying simulation"...If you search for this in google, first few pages of results are for training agents. I frequently go beyond first page in the hope of finding a long tail result that fits my needs.
- tbatterii 12y agothere was a need for this? yet somehow reader had to die?
- niels_olson 12y agoWill this break my xmarks collection and, after I've added content, can I revert the new stuff back into xmarks later? I have been shepherding my collection since before del.icio.us had a bookmarklet, indeed since Netscape. Xmarks, despite its warts, at least it has cleanup tools I can us now and again, and I can take it with me to Firefox or Safari if needs be.
- hokkos 12y agoIt doesn't seem to even index the bookmarked pages, what is the point ?
- IkmoIkmo 12y agoDon't feel very enticed to move away from Pocket at the moment...
- ppetty 12y agoThis is the perfect opportunity for someone to build a comparable service to swoop in & save the day when this gets shut down.
- jfb 12y agoPeople, just use Pinboard.