I am going to be writing a little bit about things that I have found that make my life easier. This is one google product that I have been using and loving , yet it doesn’t seem to get any publicity; it’s Google Bookmarks.
I had been looking for a while for a way to handle my bookmarks. There are options out there. Apple’s MobileMe will sync your bookmarks to the cloud, but it didn’t seem to have a solution with Windows (and thus my work machines), there are tons of linking services; Digg, Delicious, etc… But those were all social bookmarking. I wanted something that was in the cloud, that was private, easily organizable. I thought to myself: Why the hell does Google not do bookmarks?!?!? Which led me to wonder if they did.
I did a quick search for ‘Google Bookmarks‘ and sure enough there it is! It lacks the spit and polish of most of their products, but it is quickly working its way up my favorite products list. You see I was sick and tired of emailing myself links that I found at work, or at other’s computers. It would be something like, see an interesting link off a blog, follow a few more pages, bam! This is a great tutorial! Now I need to get that tutorial to somewhere I will remember it, and that I could easily find it again. That was done through tags in Google Reader or through emailing it to myself, both of whice were crappy solutions.
Now I just use Google’s booksmarks service. The key is placing a link (this one: Bookmark This Page – you can just drag it to your bar), in your bookmark bar in your browser. When you click it, it will open a dialog box with the information of the current page in it. You can add coma seperated tags, and add a description. Clicking OK adds it to your bookmarks, which is accessible at: http://www.google.com/bookmarks/. This gives you a similar searching and browsing structure as GMail.
I absolutely love that I have all my bookmarks with me at all times. It is also very very easy to add a new link to the system. It really is a simple yet elegant solution to my problem. Are there are any other solutions that you like? This may not be typical Google clean, but it certainly the best solution that I have found.