Xmarks service ends January 2011

[bill]

As we don't have a general browsers forum, and Xmarks started its life as Foxmarks, I thought it would be best to post this in the Firefox forum.

I received an e-mail today announcing that Xmarks, an incredibly useful and free browser synchronization service, will cease operations as of January 10, 2011. It's unfortunate that they couldn't pick up an investor or buyer as many people depend on this service to synchronize bookmarks, passwords and tabs across most of the major browsers.

Here's the announcement on their blog:

End of the Road for Xmarks [blog.xmarks.com]

By Spring 2010, with money running tight and options fading, we started searching for potential buyers of the company. Over the past three months, we have been remarkably close to striking a deal, only to have the potential buyer get cold feet. We also considered refocusing Xmarks as a freemium sync business, but the prospects there are grim too: with the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free.

[Robert Charlton]

Xmarks Victory for the Users, by the Users
http://blog.xmarks.com/?p=1988 [blog.xmarks.com]

October 7, 2010

The past ten days have been an amazing lesson in the power of community. Not in the “web 2.0 social graph” sense – I’m talking about old school community with users speaking up, speaking out and banding together. Thank you Xmarks users. You told the world it was simply unacceptable for our service to shut down and it worked. Thanks to your passion, Xmarks now has multiple offers from companies ready and willing to take over the service and keep making browser sync better and better!

This is not a signed, sealed done deal yet. But with multiple offers on the table we’re pretty confident that Xmarks will continue on with no service interruption....

[bill]

That's very good news indeed. I hope they do find a way to continue this service. Nothing else out there did cross browser bookmark sync the same way.

[Robert Charlton]

I thought you'd be happy about it. :) I should mention, btw, that I found out about this on the Google chrome extensions page for Xmarks...

[chrome.google.com...]

NOTE: Xmarks lives, thanks to our users! Learn more at http://blog.xmarks.com

I'm still not an Xmarks user, btw. I consider many of my Favorites extremely private, because I use them for project management, and I've been hesitant about putting them on a public server. I'm sure I'll make the leap eventually.