Google bookmarks — is that the best they can do?
Okay, it’s not as bad as the Google China thing, but I have to say the bookmark feature that Google just released has to be one of the lamest things to come down the Web 2.0 pike since Froogle. I mean, come on. Saving your bookmarks with a toolbar? How 1990s. Sure, you can keep them in one place so you can get to them from anywhere — Yahoo’s only had that for about two years.
Not only that, but I have to say that Google’s implementation sucks, from a whole bunch of different perspectives. One, it relies primarily on a toolbar, which I hate. I don’t need or want another toolbar offering to install itself, and I don’t care how useful it pretends to be. Whatever happened to bookmarklets and plug-ins? I thought that was the wave of the future. Of course, Google isn’t even supporting Firefox with this one yet, so there’s another strike against it. And when you go to the Google site — which you can do if you don’t want to use the toolbar — there’s no way to import bookmarks from a browser or file, or to sort them.
Then there’s the fact that there’s nothing even remotely different about what Google is doing — no digg.com-style ratings, no del.icio.us-style sharing, no integration with any other part of the Google-verse even. Kind of like the company’s blog search isn’t anywhere to be found when you’re searching Google news, which you would think would be a natural (Yahoo seems to think it is, since their search blends both). In other words, a completely ho-hum product. Why even bother?
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grazr
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busted tees
Jumpin’s, *someone* hasn’t let his lunch digest. But nice work with the most excellent, hellzapoppin’ rant :-)
– Stuart
Mathew Ingramisn’t impressed with the new version of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Mike Arrington likes it. Having once idiotically said that I didn’t see what the big deal was about Firefox, I now use it exclusively. So I don’t get to try out the new Google Toolbar.
I think this is just a warm-up for Google. The next steps will probably be to automatically publish these bookmarks to custom pages, then add tagging and maybe ratings. I think right now they’re getting their feet wet while they play with ideas behind closed doors.
I hope you’re right — I think that kind of thing would make a lot of sense. I hope this is just the beginning.
Mathew