Xmarks calls it quits

I have tried the BYOS and it works for Xmarks Firefox, too bad there's no BYOS feature in Xmark Safari!!!!!

I discovered this link below about syncing Safari bookmarks to Dropbox. There seems to be a Firefox version too. This doesn't sync between different kinds of browsers, but as for that maybe there's an add-on or extension for that if you need it.

http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/SyncSafariBookmarks

http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/SyncFirefoxBookmarks

You don't 'ask' your userbase if they would pay, you just 'go paid'.

My answer to anyone who asked 'would you pay for x' would of course be 'no' - because it is in my best interest to force the company to find a free model.

However, if XMarks went paid, *I* would be forced into making that decision, and I probably would have.

Not actually *trying* a paid model is beyond lazy - and irresponsible to the employees, investors, and users of XMarks.

You already have a mature userbase and service in place - slapping PayPal, Amazon Payments, Google Checkout, or even a merchant credit card account onto that is not exactly rocket science.

its the *least* a responsible company would do.

The browser vendors need to get on the ball and implement a universal bookmark format and browser-agnostic syncing system ASAP. I mean, really -- after twenty years of browser coexistence, we still have no vendor-supported solution for this? It's frankly ridiculous.

For the nonce, perhaps we should turn our backs on browser bookmarks and rely solely on cloud-based bookmarks. Pinboard is perhaps the best such web service. It's not free like Delicious, but it is independent and cheap enough (less than $7 for a lifetime subscription). It has an iPhone-optimized page. There's at least one Safari extension that lets you search and open your Pinboard bookmarks without having use their website; perhaps extensions for other browsers will come.

It seems like the browser vendors have been trying to wean us off browser-based bookmarks for a long time. That's how I interpret their lackadaisical support for them. Perhaps we should take the hint?

Make xmarks open source

Please write to them here: http://getsatisfaction.com/foxmarks/topics/open_source_byos?utm_medium=widget&utm_source=widget_foxmarks

i like chrome's own sync, but I've been using xmarks for about 3 years now to sync all of my browsers. It especially hurts because I can't sync iphone bookmarks to chrome. I'd been using xmarks to sync between chrome and safari so I could sync to my iphone. Also I paid for the xmarks iphone app a while back...guess that was a waste.

No way - I would gladly pay and yearly subscription of $20 (per year) to keep this service going...

This is a shame. It's great software. I'm surprised they don't foresee enough users with a pricing model that would be worthwhile.

I was very sad to read this email. I've recommended it, loved it, slept with it.... Ok j/k about that last part.
Xmarks was always a peice of software I respected an loved cuz it just worked so damn well and effortlessly. They should give you an option to host the sync file on Dropbox or sugarsync. That ought to drop their expenses an order of magnitude.

Yep... I would pay for this service. It actually saved me today... I couldn't get into Mac OS X and it thankfully remembered my Firefox history in Windows 7 so that I could find out what commands I erroneously used in Mac OS X to back track. Priceless!