Web Browser Wednesday
Sometimes I can’t believe how many bookmarks users have. I’ve seen people who only bookmark a handful of the sites that they use the most, while others have thousands of bookmarks. I fall somewhere in between with a few hundred bookmarks, but one thing that I’ve come to realize is how difficult it can be to gain access to all of my bookmarks when I’m on-the-go.
Today we’re going to show you five terrific ways that you can access your bookmarks from a mobile device, and each solution presented here has a mobile-optimized version for browsing your bookmarks. It was a little tougher than I thought to find the quality sites that I eventually came across, and I was quite surprised at how few bookmarking sites actually have mobile versions available.
Without further ado we’ll get the ball rolling what’s likely to be a huge fan favorite…
–Foxmarks Mobile–
Foxmarks is a Firefox extension that synchronizes Firefox’s bookmarks with an online server. I’ve always used the service as a way to backup my bookmarks, but “ayup” pointed out in the comments last week that they also offer a mobile site. It’s not an extravagant site by any means, but you can fully browse all of your directories and quickly open bookmarks. In my opinion this is what mobile bookmarking is all about, but it would be nice to be able to add bookmarks from this interface.
–Opera Link–
Opera was really smart when they launched their Opera Link service, which ties your desktop’s bookmarks together with your mobile device. The only catch is that you have to be using the Opera software (on both your desktop and mobile device) to really take advantage of everything Opera Link has to offer. The service is still accessible in other browsers via link.opera.com, but the site is not really optimized for mobile browsing.
–Del.icio.us Mobile–
I really can’t believe that Del.icio.us, one of the most popular bookmarking sites, doesn’t have an official mobile site. Steve Rubel has come to the rescue by posting some variations of stripped-down pages that display your bookmarks. Just replace USERNAME with your own Del.icio.us username:
- Bookmarks and Descriptions
http://del.icio.us/html/USERNAME/?extended=body&tags=no&rssbutton=no - Bookmarks Only
http://del.icio.us/html/USERNAME/?tags=no&rssbutton=no - Bookmarks and Tags
http://del.icio.us/html/USERNAME/?&rssbutton=no - Increase the Bookmark Count to 100
http://del.icio.us/html/USERNAME/?&rssbutton=no&count=100
It’s not exactly the best solution, but it works for those of you looking for something simple. The next two mobile bookmarking solutions we’ve listed support Del.icio.us though…
–Mobleo.net–
Mobleo is a full-blown mobile bookmarking solution that goes above and beyond anything that I expected. It has a desktop browser interface available so that managing your bookmarks on your computer is a piece of cake. You can make your bookmarks public or private, organize them into groups, grab some or all of your Del.icio.us bookmarks, prioritize them, and much more.
The mobile interface compliments the service very well. You can manage your bookmarks, browse through the different groups, and surf the different sites using the Mobilfier technology. Mobilfier optimizes a site by stripping unnecessary layout information thereby speeding up the load time. Pretty slick, huh?
–Mobilicio.us–
Mobilicio.us creates a mobile interface for accessing and navigating bookmarks stored on Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, and Wieza. You just have to log into your account, and you can start browsing your bookmarks page by page. Alternatively you can filter through them by tag name, URL, or description.
The thing that I really like about Mobilicio.us is that you can customize the size of the text on the page. If you have good eyes you can make it pretty small to conserve screen space!
By default Mobilicio.us will modify the URL’s of your bookmarks so that they pass through Google’s mobile transcoding service. You can turn this off in the settings, but if you’re on a device with a slow connection it will definitely help by having Google optimize (such as remove the CSS) the page first.
–Overview–
Now is your time to chime in! Let us know in the comments below how you get access to all of your bookmarks when you’re on-the-go.
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Tags: CyberNotes, Web Sites, Bookmark, Mobile
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Ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking service, very similar to Delicious, that offers a built in Mobile client. The regular site for Ma.gnolia is at http://ma.gnolia.com and the mobile site is at http://m.gnolia.com. Works very well.
intersting post.In fact I fall into the category -thousands of bookmarks stored in different profiles and versions of firefox,opera,k-meleon,IE6,sleipnir etc but these are all on the same pc,so I w’d welcome any suggestions about how best to SYNCH all these bookmarks? Right now Iam doing it manually wasting lot of time and energy-so any suggestions or infact any post exclusively covering this w’d be most welcome.
I like Foxmarks best.
It allows you to store and sync your bookmarks on an FTP server of *your* choice, and doesn’t force you to use their service.
I have a number of private bookmarks I’d like to have access to without exposing them on a remote server not of my own choosing. Foxmarks makes the grade!
You’re best bet would be to use something like Del.icio.us because a quick search on Google reveals that there are a lot of different bookmarklets out there for it. That way you can save and mange your bookmarks in any browser.