September 25, 2001

7:17 AM

Bookmark Sync to start charging users. From an e-mail this morning: "Starting November 1, 2001, BookmarkSync will be available for a one-time fee of $50. Paid customers will receive the software and unlimited, ad-free access to our web services for life."
posted by mrbula (25 comments total)

I don't know how many of you depend on this service, but for those of us who do, this sucks. Of course, there's a WTC tie-in, with 20% of revenue going to the September 11th Fund: "Please license your client before November 1 to keep using this useful utility, take advantage of the special offer and help us to support the victims of the World Trade Center attack."

Nice timing.
posted by mrbula at 7:19 AM on September 25, 2001

No kidding. I don't use the service, but considering how short some "lifetime" offers have proven to be on the Web, $50 is a lot fo pay. What happens in six months if the number of subscriptions doesn't sustain the service? Also, I don't like the way they are using Sept. 11 charity as an incentive to subscribe quickly.
posted by rcade at 7:32 AM on September 25, 2001

Blink (www.blink.com), too, is about to start limiting free accounts to no more than 100 bookmarks. Unlimited accounts will cost $5/month.
posted by Allen Varney at 7:43 AM on September 25, 2001

Assuming you don't have a domain: Geocities account. Upload bookmarks.htm.
Drag bookmarks.htm to your A:(or equivalent) drive.

How often do you make a crucial new bookmark you just can't live without that a service like this is actually necessary? I'm really curious.
posted by Su at 7:53 AM on September 25, 2001

Yahoo! offers a bookmark sync service for free and it works really well for me.

Also, add Freedrive.com to the list of companies that just sent out e-mails to users telling them the service will no longer be free. Freedrive sent an e-mail saying only paying premium accounts will have an allotted disk space that they can share w/others. Everyone who doesn't upgrade will still have their account but their files will be wiped.
posted by suprfli at 8:08 AM on September 25, 2001

Paid customers will receive the software and unlimited, ad-free access to our web services for life.

Where "for life" = "until our financing runs out."
posted by rodii at 8:28 AM on September 25, 2001

Where "for life" = "until our financing runs out."

Well, yeah. You didn't think they were talking about free for your life, did you? It's free for the life of the company.
posted by kindall at 8:41 AM on September 25, 2001

Unfortunately, Yahoo!'s Companion still doesn't work with Netscape 6, my default browser. (And no, I'm not changing.)
posted by mrbula at 8:52 AM on September 25, 2001

supfli, what's the Yahoo! bookmark sync service you are talking about?

I hope you're not referring to Yahoo! Companion, because: a)it doesn't do bookmark syncing, b)it's too poor in what comes to bookmarks management.
posted by kchristidis at 9:44 AM on September 25, 2001

I hope you're not referring to Yahoo! Companion, because: a)it doesn't do bookmark syncing, b)it's too poor in what comes to bookmarks management.

With the combination of Yahoo! Bookmarks (http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/) and Yahoo! Companion (http://companion.yahoo.com/), Yahoo! does provide a useful way of keeping your bookmarks all in one place, easily accessible via Companion or the Bookmarks site. It's pretty useful, but has a 1000 item limit, causing me to start using my old MyBookmarks.com account.

SyncIt seems pretty much like what MyBookMarks.com offers, though the latter uses independent software and their web site to maintain your bookmarks, rather than placing them directly into Favorites.

Any other great bookmark sites out there that you can recommend?
posted by valerie at 11:25 AM on September 25, 2001

I hope you're not referring to Yahoo! Companion, because: a)it doesn't do bookmark syncing, b)it's too poor in what comes to bookmarks management.

With the combination of Yahoo! Bookmarks (http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/) and Yahoo! Companion (http://companion.yahoo.com/), Yahoo! does provide a useful way of keeping your bookmarks all in one place, easily accessible via Companion or the Bookmarks site. However, it has a 1000 item limit, causing me to start using my old MyBookmarks.com account.

SyncIt seems pretty much like what MyBookMarks.com offers, though the latter uses independent software and their web site to maintain your bookmarks, rather than placing them directly into Favorites.

Any other great bookmark sites out there that you can recommend?
posted by valerie at 11:25 AM on September 25, 2001

Oops, looks like my browser was having troubles there..
posted by valerie at 11:26 AM on September 25, 2001

No kidding. I don't use the service, but considering how short some "lifetime" offers have proven to be on the Web, $50 is a lot fo pay.

On the web its damned if you do and damned if you don't. If they started as a pay service they wouldn't have one tenth the users they have now. Being free for a lifetime eliminates any competition that starts as pay service. So they waste investors's dollars and now that the playing field is safe they drop the expected axe with some sanctimonious 9/11 incentive.

I wonder why gross undercutting laws don't apply to the web.
posted by skallas at 12:39 PM on September 25, 2001

I know a great place that offers a way to organize and manage personal web content at wURLdBook. This is a subscription based service that charges $100.00/year. It's very flexible and provides a lot of interesting features for members, even the trial account provides many useful features too. wURLdBook provides a way of organizing web content into taxonomies and provides excellent searching and cross referencing features. It's geared towards professional who use and rely on the web for information and fast retrieval of infomation. I like it.
posted by olav at 5:02 PM on January 27, 2002

The preceding was spam. Thank you for your time.
posted by rodii at 8:56 PM on January 28, 2002

Well, I disagree with you Rod Johnson.

I guess you're a bit of a "newbie" in regards to the classification of spam.

First of all Valerie asks "Any other great bookmark sites out there that you can recommend?" and since I happen to have such a service I recommended it and second, it is the TOPIC of this thread I feel the mentioning my service once the thread activity died down for posterity an ok thing to do.

I'm not sure who nominated you as the "SPAM" police but I think you better graduate first before you start shooting your mouth off.

Thank you for your time.
posted by olav at 9:21 AM on February 22, 2002

I appreciate the detective work you must have done ferreting out my name, Olav. You *must* be a professional information forager!

Everything else is wrong, though. Please see this MetaTalk thread for more.
posted by rodii at 3:55 PM on February 24, 2002

Sarcasim is the lowest form of humor.

Anyway, I must say you are the detective figuring out that my homepage link is wURLdBook. You *caught* me. I must admit though, re-reading the post did come off a little bit like a press release but, no harm was meant. And, like I said before, I posted well after the thread was dead for posterity only.

On another note I have discerned that you are a bitter/petty person to actually ridicule my online service tag line just so you can feel like a bigger person. Your self righteousness makes me think you are a very young and idealistic then to post on metatalk for justification. That's just plain weird, you have to much time on you hands.
posted by olav at 9:48 AM on February 25, 2002

Olav, I have spent about ten minutes of my "young" (I wish) life thinking about you, which is about nine-and-a-half minutes more than you deserve. Just to help calibrate your sense of importance to me, this is more than it takes to step around a wino on the sidewalk but less than it takes to stand in line at a fast food restaurant. Draw your own conclusions.
posted by rodii at 12:39 PM on February 26, 2002

Rod Johnson,

When I mention "young" I was speaking of maturity.

You just proved my point with more of your self serving vitriol.
posted by olav at 9:20 AM on February 28, 2002

We're havin' fun now.
posted by rodii at 3:19 PM on February 28, 2002

I see you are still wasting your "precious" time...
posted by olav at 8:16 AM on March 2, 2002

Forage for a clue, Olav. It's abusive to post a message pretending to be a fan of your own site.

It's also so completely pathetic that people here are likely to forever associate you and your site with this transparent and embarrassing attempt to spam us. Is that really what you want people to remember for posterity?

At any time, feel free to stumble upon the correct response to this situation: "I'm sorry -- I should have admitted that it was my site. I don't know what got into me. I will never do it again. And thank you, thank you, Rod Johnson for showing me the error of my ways."
posted by rcade at 11:21 AM on March 2, 2002

You are a pathetic, sorry case Rod Johnson. Thank you for showing that to me. As usual you over state the facts and embellish freely to justify your self-righteous cause. Your hyporcritic, passive/agressive argument techniques are so worn and immature it's pathetic. Bringing this whole "thread" into the personal arena is typical of a person of your low moral character.
posted by olav at 9:44 AM on March 3, 2002

Um, did you perhaps not notice that the preceding comment wasn't written by me?
posted by rodii at 7:14 PM on March 3, 2002