Why I Migrated From Del.icio.us to Google Bookmarks.

I've supported Del.icio.us since I knew of it. It's been over three years. Recently, while reading lifehacker, I found out about a program for Mac called dead.icious. It's function is to help the user go through their delicious bookmarks and find the ones that are dead, or broken. I've been gathering bookmarks on delicious for a while now. When I first started, I was pretty excited about the whole "social bookmarking" thing, and it was the first site where I had seen tags used. Tags have since become huge in software for the web. Long story short, I was adding many, many new links to my bookmark library. Later, Useff introduced me to a Firefox extention called Foxylicious which would import my bookmarks from delicious into a regular bookmark folder in Firefox, which gives the effect of localizing all of one's delicious bookmarks so that they can be used at any given time. At this point, my use of delicious wasn't just to find new stuff - I depended on it as my bookmarks folder. It was convenient because this way, I could access my bookmarks from anywhere I wanted to.

Let's get a little closer to the present date and time; specifically, yesterday. I saw that program called dead.icious and decided to look into writing a similar program for linux, since it was Mac only. I started fooling around with the delicious API and doing some routine web searches to learn about how others had utilized it. In short, I didn't want to reinvent the wheel. Along the way, I was picking up bits and pieces about Google's bookmarking tool which was basically modeled after del.icio.us. Wanting to learn more about this led me to a program someone wrote that allows you to import your delicious bookmarks into google bookmarks. I decided to try this to see how they compared to each other. I found a Firefox extension that is very similar to foxylicious, but in my opinion, superior. True, it doesn't save your bookmarks locally, which may be construed as a negative for some users. But on the other hand, it's prettier, faster, and ultimately more convenient than the combo of foxylicious / delicious because it allows me to set up hierarchies in the folders it creates, which allows me to have folders within folders by adding a / to any tag. This makes everything a lot cleaner and easier to read. It's a real pain going through a long list of bookmarks trying to find what you want. It's so much easier when they're organized into smaller folders that are hierarchal and more specific. Anyway, I didn't exactly reach my original intended goal of writing that program, but I still managed to do something positive. Oh, and I got rid of all my dead and useless bookmarks.

Google Bookmarks
Google Bookmarks Button Extension
del.icio.us to Google

Screenshots of the Google Bookmarks Button Extension are available at the extension's homepage.