The useful Xmarks service nearly shut down this past September, but gained a new lease on life when it was acquired by LastPass earlier this month. For people who use multiple computers and even different browsers on those computers, Xmarks is superb for bookmark management. On the desktop, Xmarks currently supports Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, so for most mainstream web users, the service has you covered.

To be sure, Xmarks isn’t the first to merge and manage bookmarks between desktops and smartphones; I looked at Mozilla’s Firefox for Maemo early this year, and the mobile browser synchronized bookmarks using Mozilla’s Weave platform. I expect similar solutions to follow in the footsteps of Mozilla and Xmarks; with a growing reliance on mobile devices, we want the personal data and preferences from desktops to automatically follow us on handhelds.

Since I’m a dedicated Google Chrome user on the desktop, I’m already using Google to sync my bookmarks, as the Dolphin HD Browser already supports that functionality. I won’t be using the new Xmarks plug-in as a result, but I can see why Xmarks users would: it’s a pain to manage bookmarks in multiple places.

I do, however, use the Dolphin HD Browser, at least on my Galaxy Tab device, and I recommend any Android device owner give it a try. It’s full-featured, supports extensions and runs much faster on my Tab than the native, Samsung-customized browser. Here’s a video look at Dolphin HD on the HTC Evo 4G if you’re not sure it’s worth a download, although if you’re an Xmarks user, you probably need a little less convincing to try the browser now.

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For the time being, the two complementary services will remain as distinct offerings, although there are plans to integrate them in the future. LastPass’s CEO Joe Siegrist, says that the deal puts the company in “a great position to make the preeminent cross browser, cross platform, cross device browser sync service which is what we’re planning.” Siegrist says that LastPass has been successful as a “freemium” offering, with most of the service’s features being available for free but enticing users to pay for a premium service through its mobile applications, and that the company believes the same approach can also work for Xmarks. A single cross-platform browser sync service that works across browsers and on every device would certainly be an attractive offering, and one that many users would be willing to pay for.

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The Xmarks developers offer alternatives, but the only one they can suggest for Safari users is Apple’s  MobileMe service. As MobileMe costs $99 a year, subscribing just for the sake of syncing your Safari bookmarks is a bit costly. If you use any other browser, there are free alternatives such as Firefox Sync and Chrome Sync.

I’ve seen some weird and wacky ways of syncing Safari bookmarks, including emailing yourself every time you change your bookmarks, or simply “remember which bookmarks you’ve added and add them on the other machine(s),” neither of which are helpful. I’ve discovered a much more useful method involving Dropbox. It’s not as automatic as Xmarks was, but it gets the job done.

There are two ways of doing this: one uses a free download called SymbolicLinker, and the other uses Terminal.app. I’ll start by going through the steps for using SymbolicLinker, then I’ll talk about the Terminal method.

Using SymbolicLinker

1. Download SymbolicLinker. It can be found on MacUpdate. It’s not an application, but a Service you can install, which adds a new option when you right-click an item in the Finder. To install it, simply double-click the SymbolicLinker.service icon.
2. Get Dropbox. You can sign up for free. A free Dropbox account gives you 2GB of space. Obviously you can skip this step if you already have Dropbox.
3. Quit Safari. Safari will get confused if you start messing around with its files while it’s still running.
4. Create a ‘Bookmarks’ folder in Dropbox. It doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as you remember that it’s for your bookmarks.
5. Move the Bookmarks file from Safari to Dropbox. The file is called Bookmarks.plist and is located in [your Home folder]>Library>Safari. Make sure you move it rather than copy it over.
6. Create a symbolic link to the Bookmarks file. To do this, right-click Bookmarks.plist and choose Make Symbolic Link, which is the new option added by SymbolicLinker. Now drag the new file, ‘Bookmarks.plist symlink’, back to where you found the original file. Rename it back to ‘Bookmarks.plist’.

You can now re-open Safari to check that all your bookmarks are still there and that they work properly. Next, repeat these steps on the other computers you want to keep in sync:

1. Download and install SymbolicLinker. Do this exactly the same way as before.
2. Sync the computer with Dropbox. Make sure the new Bookmarks.plist file is completely downloaded before continuing.
3. Quit Safari.
4. Create a symbolic link to the Bookmarks.plist file in Dropbox. Delete the Bookmarks.plist file in Library>Safari and replace it with the symbolic link, again renaming it to simply ‘Bookmarks.plist’.
5. Reopen Safari and check it works. It should work first time, but if it doesn’t, retry the steps, and make sure Bookmarks.plist has a capital ‘B’.

The Terminal Method

Using Terminal (Applications>Utilities>Terminal) achieves exactly the same thing, using the same method, but just doesn’t involve any downloads. For this example, I’m going to put the Bookmarks file into Dropbox>Safari, but it works for any folder. Just switch out the file paths in the Terminal.

1. Create your folder in Dropbox. Again, doesn’t matter what you call it.
2. Move the Bookmarks file into Dropbox. Once again, you need to make sure that you’re moving the file and not copying it, otherwise you get an error saying that the file already exists.
3. Navigate to the Safari folder using Terminal. This can be done by typing (or copying and pasting):

cd ~/Library/Safari

4. Create the symbolic link. Do this by entering the following into Terminal:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Safari/Bookmarks.plist Bookmarks.plist

5. Restart Safari.

The Problem

Unfortunately, the problem with changing the Bookmarks.plist directly is you have to quit and reopen Safari in order to update the bookmarks on each machine. It’s still definitely a lot easier than remembering the bookmarks you’ve got and adding them to your other machines manually. Also, it doesn’t cost $99 a year.

I’m sure that there are a whole bunch of other methods, perhaps using Automator or maybe another service similar to Xmarks, which accomplish the same task. If you know about any of those, please share below.

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In 2006, XMarks started out as a Firefox-plugin, which allowed consumers to take their browser bookmarks and save them on the Internet and sync them across multiple computers. Over the years, the company that was once known as Foxmarks, developed plugins and extensions for different browsers. The company experimented with various different business models including new search and discovery products. However, none of those caught on.

We weren’t able to find a sustainable business model for Xmarks. The advertising you may have seen on Xmarks.com generates only a small fraction of the revenue we need to cover our operational costs; we had been working hard to create search and discovery products that could take the company to profitability and beyond, but we didn’t generate enough consumer adoption or advertiser adoption of these new products.

From what I hear, the company was pretty close to selling itself to Google. Clearly that didn’t work out. The company had about 5 million active users of its various different plugins. The Xmarks syncing service will stay live through end of 2010. Most new browsers offer syncing bookmarks as a featured offering.

Update: Xmarks co-founder and CTO Todd Agulnick recounted the company’s ups and downs in a blog post today, thanking investors and users. Joaquin told me, “We made an impressive attempt to monetize our 1 billion bookmark corpus with several innovative search products, but ultimately we didn’t find a scalable business model. With Firefox and Google building sync into the browser, it’s the end of the road for Xmarks.”

Speed is always an issue, of course. But for me, and many others who use Firefox, its advantage is that it’s really more than just a browser. With the judicious addition of some well-designed add-ons, it can be a tool for managing multiple email accounts, testing and troubleshooting web pages, managing passwords, synchronizing data, and much more.

Other browsers offer add-ons, too, but as far as I know, no other browser has all of the add-ons that I use. Some I’ve written about before, but others are relatively new additions to my toolbox.

• Gmail Manager. I use this add-on constantly. It allows me to manage multiple Gmail and Google Apps Mail accounts without opening multiple tabs or a separate email program.
• Google Shortcuts. I also use a lot of other Google products (like Reader and Webmaster Tools, for example), but find that their URLs aren’t necessarily memorable. This add-on lets me create simple shortcuts to the Google pages that I often visit.
• Firebug and Web Developer. These add-ons are tools that no web developer should be without. They provide a huge range of functions for testing and troubleshooting HTML, CSS and much more.
• 1Password and LastPass. These add-ons manage password data and sync it with other computers, as well as mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod touch. Yes, I probably don’t need two password managers, but each has its advantages, and I really can’t afford to lose the huge number of passwords I have. So I use both; they co-exist surprisingly well.
• XMarks. In addition to passwords, it’s handy to be able to sync browsing history and bookmarks between computers, which XMarks does well. It can also sync passwords, although I don’t use it for that.
• Screengrab and NoSquint. These add-ons make minor, but very useful, improvements to the built-in features of Firefox. Screengrab allows one to take screenshots within the browser, and NoSquint lets one adjust zoom levels on a site-by-site basis.
• All-in-One Sidebar (AIOS). I do like one feature of Opera — the ability for one’s history, add-ons and downloads to show up in a sidebar rather than popup windows. AIOS is a very configurable Firefox add-on that makes for a much cleaner browser display.
• Finally, Adblock Plus.

Of course, as a web developer, I do need to make sure that the sites my company makes are compatible with many different browsers and operating systems. But frankly, I spend most of the day in a browser, and so far, that browser is still Firefox.

What is your preferred web browser?

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Previously named Foxmarks, this plugin has now been made available for Safari, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer as well as Firefox, which previously was the only browser it supported.

Once you’ve downloaded Xmarks for whichever browsers you use, all you have to do is set up an account and the software will do the rest, working either as a preferences pane or as a plugin directly in the browser. All your bookmarks, whether they are in the bookmarks toolbar or in the folder hierarchy, are sent to the cloud, ready for syncing with another computer. When you log in from the second computer, you can even choose whether to replace your local bookmarks or merge them with the cloud.

Now whenever you make a change to your bookmarks, even if you only change the name or the location of one of them, the changes are synced with the website and changed accordingly on your other computers.

Xmarks also allows you to access your bookmarks from the Xmarks website, which is useful if you need to access one of them from a public computer, for example. Also available on the website is the ability to search the web and have the results sorted by how many people have the site in their bookmarks, allowing you to find sites based on whether other people have decided they are good, rather than what a search engine decides.

Like a lot of small-business owners, it won’t be possible for me to disconnect entirely; I’ll need to be on call, and to have access to my work. But I want to carry as little as possible, and make the transition from the office to the train as painless as I can.

Luckily, I’ve been taking advantage of cloud services, so preparing for this trip has been easier than those in the past. I recently bought a 13″ MacBook Pro at around the same time Scott did, but since I’ve been using a Mac mini as my primary machine for the past couple of years, transferring my data and settings to the laptop was pretty easy.

For mail, I have several IMAP-based Google Apps and Gmail accounts, and I was able to use the Migration Assistant to transfer my Apple Mail settings. It was actually easier to re-download the messages from Google’s servers than to copy several gigabytes of messages from the old mini.

Similarly, it was easy to back up and restore calendar and Address Book settings; I did make an abbu file backup, then restore it to the new machine, since Apple includes some data that Google Contacts doesn’t.

For IM, it was easy to copy Adium settings. For passwords, I had already set up Dropbox to sync 1Password data; as backup, I also use the cloud-based Lastpass. I use Xmarks to sync Firefox history, and I could have copied other settings too, although I chose not to, in order to do a little spring cleaning.

Once I’m on the road, I’ll stay connected to the mini in my office through Apple’s Screen Sharing and to my company’s Windows servers through Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection. I’ll be using the Sprint Overdrive hotspot for connectivity, and although I’m sure that there will be places with no signal, Sprint has just activated 4G service in a couple of the places I’ll be.

I’ll also be taking the Bookeen Cybook Opus e-book reader, which has grown on me since I wrote about it, and a Belkin surge protector/USB charger; Amtrak has pretty reliable power, but it never hurts to be safe.

Of course, lots of things can go wrong, but I think that I’m pretty well prepared for my trip. So…all aboard! I’ll let you know how it goes.

How do you prepare for travel?

Amtrak image by Flickr user lazytom.

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To get the feature working, you’ll need to download a special preview of the Firefox add-on (Xmarks says that the final version should be available from the Mozilla Add-Ons site soon), and then enable the feature via Tools->Xmarks->Settings->Sync.

Xmarks works in the background and saves the state of your tabs to the server whenever they change. Then, when you want to open your saved tabs from another machine, you can do so via the Xmarks menu:

You might be thinking this is no big deal — after all, Mozilla Weave also offers open tab sync for Firefox. However, Xmarks states that this functionality will be rolled out to my.xmarks.com and Xmarks for Chrome, which means that soon we could have cross-browser open tab sync — a very tantalizing prospect!

Xmarks has been busy recently; the company has also just announced a new augmented search product called SearchBoost, which overlays ratings and reviews onto PPC ads in search results.

What do you think of the open tab sync in Xmarks?

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Based on that concept, Xmarks is launching a new product called SearchBoost. “As I hinted earlier, this is our business model,” said James Joaquin, the chief executive officer of Xmarks. “The paid service overlays ratings and reviews onto their pay-per-click (PPC) ads across the 450 million searches performed by Xmarks users each month.” The company currently has 4.5 million active add-on users and has a billion bookmarks in its database. Joaquin says that the company ran “an extensive 30-day test across 200K users and found that, on average, SearchBoost increases PPC click-through rates by 15 percent.”

Well now all they have to do is find customers and convince them to pay for this service.

I’ve been taking Weave for a spin, and have found it to be very intuitive. As is true of XMarks, which works with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari — but concentrates primarily on syncing browser bookmarks — Weave is likely to be especially appreciated by users who want to keep passwords, preferences and personal data uniform across multiple devices. The more mobile devices you use, the more you’ll like it. Weave is available in Firefox through the Tools menu, as seen below.

Once you install Weave (you need Firefox 3.5 or greater), you need to sign in and create an account, after which preferences you save will be stored in the cloud. For those who balk at having personal information stored online, there is an option for setting Weave up on a local server.

If you, as I do, favor Firefox (or the Fennec browser from Mozilla), Weave is likely to become your synchronization tool of choice, as it’s especially attuned to preferences that you set in the browser. According to Mozilla’s post announcing it, “future releases of Weave Sync will add support for synchronizing your browser add-ons, search plugins and other customizations and ultimately everything that makes your Firefox and Web experience personal.”

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