Sad to hear Xmarks will be saying good-bye

Xmarks will be shutting down their free browser synchronization services on January 10, 2011. For details on how to transition to recommended alternatives, consult this page.

For the full story behind the Xmarks shutdown, please read their blog post.

As I write this, it’s a typical Sunday here at Xmarks. The synchronization service continues operating quietly, the servers chugging along syncing browser data for our 2 million users across their 5 million desktops. The day isn’t over yet, but we’re on track to add just under 3000 new accounts today.

Tomorrow, however, will hardly be anything but typical, for tomorrow one of our engineers will start a script that will email each of our users to notify them that we’ll be ceasing operations in around 90 days.

This post attempts to summarize the Xmarks story: how we got to be the most heavily used browser synchronization service in the world and yet still find ourselves pulling the plug.

I for one love Xmarks, it works with all the browsers and it kept my massive list of internet bookmarks all organized and happy. Now I’ll be switching to the Firefox plug-in and it bothers me that I will no longer have my bookmarks across browsers AND computers.

I know they considered creating a paid subscription service. But even I know I don’t have the money to do that when I can get something similar free. Although I’d be open to a yearly fee as long as it were reasonable. So users have suggested allowing donations. This might work, but it’s not predictable enough to use as a business plan.

Ah well. I’m not a business-minded person, but I do love Xmarks and will be sad to see them go.