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Technology: View from the top
Cybersleuth
Posing as a thief or informing the FBI about hacker behavior -- it's all in a day's work for AntiOnline founder John Vranesevich.
By Mark Compton
[03/27/00]

21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 32
Credos of the high-tech world -- unencrypted!
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[03/25/00]

Google: We're down with ODP
Will the streamlined search engine's decision to mix in the 20,000 editors of the Open Directory Project mess with its mojo?
By Mark Durham
[03/24/00]

Books
"Beyond the Charts"
Bruce Haring sets out to tell the amazing story of how the MP3 movement turned the recording industry on its head, but misses the beat.
By Janelle Brown
[03/23/00]

Howl.com
(with apologies to Allen Ginsberg)
By Thomas Scoville
[03/22/00]

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Of course, a bevy of start-ups wants to change all that. Following in the path of Web-based services like Hotmail and Netscape's Calendar, companies like Blink, Backflip (which is a Salon partner), Hotlinks and scores of others are trying to entice you to move your bookmarks to the Web. For doing so, you'll get "anytime, anywhere access" (for all that surfing you do in Internet cafes), the ability to share links with your friends or colleagues and, in some cases, extras like tools to search your bookmarks or automatically file them by category. The companies, in turn, will get to see your favorite sites -- information that's valuable to advertisers and to the sites you bookmark. At least two of the bookmark-storing sites also want to aggregate all those links into a Yahoo-like directory.

But these sites "need to grow really big really fast," says Tim Hickman, CEO of Backflip; and it's hard to imagine how they will attract users. You don't hear many complaints from people unhappy with storing their bookmarks in a browser. And the supposed enticements of Web-based bookmarks, like the filing and searching options, would have to work perfectly (they don't) to improve on the speed and ease of a drop-down browser-based list, or even a search engine. When it takes longer to find a link I bookmarked on a few of these sites than it does to search and find it from Google, it's tough to see the value of Web-based bookmarking -- extras included.

Of course, it's much too early to write off any of these companies; the oldest ones just celebrated their first anniversaries and executives at some well-funded start-ups like Hotlinks and Clickmarks claim as many as 300,000 users, with more on the way. And as people start saving not just home page URLs but documents they want to look at later, the sites' power to organize and provide universal access to bookmarks will grow in importance, says Jonathan Abrams, CEO of Hotlinks and a former Netscape engineer.

"Bookmarks are even more important than phone numbers," says Abrams. "Web addresses are harder to remember."

That may be true. But even if you hold onto links to documents that may be taken down, and even if the number of bookmarks you store is as fat as your monthly rent, it's tough to envision a day when lost bookmarks will cause as much despair as a missing little black book, or PDA. Take the reporter I met who boasted of having Henry Kissinger's home phone number. He never called the man, waiting instead for the perfect moment when he just had to have a quote, but he protected the number like a Picasso. Kissinger's e-mail address might be equally valued, but a link to his home page? I doubt it.

"Bookmarks just aren't that compelling," says Paul Hagen, an analyst with Forrester Research. "The idea of moving them to the Web falls in line with e-mail, calendaring and phone information, which have all moved to the Web in some capacity, but to me, those moves make more sense."

These days, it's easier than ever to get back to the sites you once found, says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch. Technologies like RealNames let you type keywords directly into a browser, old search engines like Alta Vista have improved and, Sullivan adds, new search algorithms like those employed by Google have upped the ante even further.

"Back in 1994 or 1995, you had to bookmark everything you found because the search engines didn't work very well," Sullivan says. "That's no longer the case." As a result, people don't bookmark like they used to. Instead, they go back to where they located the page in the first place -- the search engines. "It's like calling information because you know you can," he says.

Statistics, however, show that bookmarks are popular. According to a survey by market research firm NFO Interactive, 74 percent of the nation's 105 million regular Web surfers use bookmarks. Savvy users, people who have used the Internet regularly for at least six months, list an average of 84 bookmarks, according to a survey commissioned by Backflip. That seems like a lot to me, but I save the text of most of the articles I find on the Web.

Maybe I'd quit that habit if automatic filing worked as well. But it doesn't. I tried five services: Blink, Hotlinks, Clickmarks, Backflip and BookmarkSync. My hopes were high, but I ended up largely unimpressed.

Next page | Am I just doing the grunt work for their new Web directory?