Many of you have asked us for a way to keep your personal bookmarks only at home, and your work bookmarks only at the office, while still synchronizing the bookmarks that both should share. We are excited to announce the ability to do so now with Bookmark Profiles!

To collect feedback on this ultra-new feature and make sure we’re doing it right, we are making Bookmark Profiles available to a limited number of people who sign up to beta test it. We want to hear from you about your experience using this feature so that we can iron out kinks before making it available to everyone. Was it intuitive or confusing? What kinds of profiles did you create? Did you run into any bugs along the way?

If you’re interested in participating in the beta test, just head over to beta.foxmarks.com to register. We’ll notify you via email you when you can download, install, and start testing. You’ll need a Foxmarks account to register for the program, and a Firefox 2 or 3 web browser to install the extension in.

Once you have access to the Profiles beta program, here’s how to keep sensitive bookmarks where they belong with Bookmark Profiles:

• Log in at my.foxmarks.com and click on the “Profiles” button.
• Create a new profile and name it to reflect its nature (e.g. “Office”).
• Choose items to include in each profile. Items must be located in the toolbar or root bookmark folder.
• Assign a profile to your browser in the “Profiles” tab of your Foxmarks extension’s “Settings” window. Your browser will now only sync items that are part of that profile.

Any items you place in a folder that is part of a profile will only appear on computers assigned to that profile. If you place items anywhere else, then they will be available on all computers.

Almost all of you have upgraded to version 2 since we announced our plans to end support for the Foxmarks version 1.0.1 extension a few weeks ago. Thanks!

For those of you who haven’t upgraded yet, please do so as soon as possible. Starting today, we will stop accepting requests from Foxmarks 1.0.1, and will instead show you a reminder notice every time it attempts to sync. If you wish to continue synchronizing your bookmarks, you will have to upgrade.

Switching to Foxmarks version 2 should be painless:

• Make sure you have cookies enabled.
• Make sure your proxy server settings don’t block Foxmarks version 2.
• Install the latest client from Mozilla Addons website.
• Walk through the Foxmarks setup process.

We are dedicated to making sure that your switch to Foxmarks version 2 is smooth, and encourage you to contact us with any problems, suggestions, or comments you might have.

We will end support for the Foxmarks version 1.0.1 extension on May 15th. After that, only users who use Foxmarks 1.0.1 with their own servers may continue to do so without interruption.

The bookmarks synchronization service will be unavailable starting at 08:00 PDT Saturday, April 12th, until 14:00 PDT. This is part of a necessary upgrade. We’ll post again here when the service is restored to normal operation.

 update: All done! Thanks for your patience.

We’re getting ready to launch some exciting new features and part of that preparation requires that Foxmarks 2 users be running the latest version of the extension (version 2.0.45). This version was released a month ago; the vast majority of users are using it already. It is at least as stable as prior versions, so the upgrade should be painless. Starting later this week users of older versions of Foxmarks will see a pop up message advising them of the need to upgrade.

We recognize that upgrading can be a hassle; we strive to minimize unnecessary updates. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where we can’t continue to support earlier versions of the extension with newer versions of the server. As always, we appreciate your patience and support.

Note that if you’re running the beta version of Foxmarks, you won’t have to do anything; the beta versions are fine as is.

Also, if you’re one of the few users who are still using Foxmarks 1.0.1, a reminder that that system is heading toward retirement.

Foxmarks continues to perform well in beta test. We’ve fixed a few more bugs and are now again admitting into the program everyone who has volunteered to test. If you see something that doesn’t look right and isn’t already on our list of known issues, please let us know about it.

Update: We forgot to mention that you can go to our beta site to join the beta program.

We will end support for the Foxmarks version 1.0.1 extension as of Thursday, May 15th. Starting Monday, April 7th, version 1.0.1 (and earlier) will periodically remind you to upgrade if you’re using the Foxmarks server. Anyone using 1.0.1 with their own server may continue to do so without interruption.

Those of you who’ve been with us several months know that when we launched Foxmarks version 2 three months ago, we ran into a host of operational issues. It was a painful experience for our users, and we learned a lot from all of you about how to better move forward. Because of the initially difficult transition to version 2, we’ve held off on retiring version 1.0.1 until we’re completely confident that version 2 was rock solid.

We’re happy to say that Foxmarks version 2 has been running smoothly since mid-January. More Foxmarks users are synchronizing now with version 2 than ever did with version 1.0.1, and are reaping the benefits of the transition: faster, more efficient synchronization, superior favicon support, upcoming Firefox 3 support, bookmarks sharing, and much, much more.

Switching to Foxmarks version 2 should be painless:

• Make sure you have cookies enabled.
• Make sure your proxy server settings don’t block Foxmarks version 2.
• Install the latest client from Mozilla Addons website.
• Walk through the Foxmarks setup process.

We want this switch to go smoothly for anyone still using version 1.0.1, and encourage you to contact us with any problems, suggestions, or comments you might have.

We appreciate your help in upgrading to Foxmarks version 2–we’re committed to making the upgrade go as smoothly as possible for everyone, so let us help in any way we can! Retiring our old software allows us to focus on making Foxmarks version 2 the quickest, most efficient, and most lovable bookmarks synchronizer available for Firefox. We think you’ll love the things we have in store for you.

Beta testing for the Firefox 3-compatible version of Foxmarks continues to go extremely well. Last week, we sent email to all testers asking them to tell us about any problems they’d seen. We got lots of responses — many telling us that they’d seen no problems at all. Whoo hoo!

We did learn of a few new issues, though, and have implemented fixes for those things. Yesterday, in fit of confidence we admitted into the beta test the entire remaining queue of people who had registered. (If you registered before yesterday and didn’t receive an invitation, it’s probably because your spam filter ate the email we sent. Head over to the beta site and you should find that you’ve been admitted.)

So things are looking quite good. There are, however, still a number of items that we’d like to take care of before we throw open the doors completely and call this a finished product.

• Firefox crash: Some users have seen both intermittent and consistent crashing of Firefox during synchronization, especially initial synchronization. We believe this is caused by a bug in Firefox, and the developers at Mozilla are now investigating. If you experience this crash, please be sure to allow Firefox to submit a crash report to Mozilla.
• Favicons getting swapped: A few users have reported seeing the wrong favicon associated with some of their bookmarks. This too seems to be a Firefox bug.
• Cosmetic problems: There are a collection of cosmetic problems with the layout of the Settings dialog on various platforms and in certain localizations. We’ll be working on these soon.
• Unfiled Bookmarks folder: The Firefox 3 “Unfiled Bookmarks” folder is sometimes erroneously duplicated within users’ bookmark sets. This, too, is something that we’re looking at.

If you experience a problem that is not on this list and haven’t already told us about it, please first make sure that you’re running the latest version of the beta extension (currently 2.0.44.14 as of this writing but being updated frequently). If the problem persists on the current version of the extension, please drop us a line to let us know about it.

We’re delighted to announce the ability to share your bookmarks online. You can share a folder of bookmarks as a web page, an RSS feed, or even a widget that you can drop into your web site or blog.

You can share as many folders as you like; as you update your bookmarks and synchronize, your shared content is automatically updated as well. None of your folders are shared by default—only folders that you’ve designated will be shared.

To share the bookmarks in a folder, log in at my.foxmarks.com, select the folder, then click on the “Sharing” button in the toolbar (see the big yellow arrow below). In the dialog that appears, select the “Share this folder” button, and you’re ready to go!

Think of all the great things you can start sharing with your friends and family: your favorite blogs, places that you’d like to go on vacation, or, like us, a sampling of our favorite comic strips.

We love hearing your feedback. If you have a specific problem or suggestion, please write to our support team; otherwise leave us a comment below.

As announced previously, Foxmarks for Firefox 3 is currently in beta test. Over the past week, we have admitted the first 40% of users who have volunteered to test.

Testing has revealed a handful of minor bugs in Foxmarks itself; we’ve been rolling out fixes as the bug reports come in. We’ve seen (and users have reported seeing) Firefox crash while Foxmarks is running, but each successive beta (starting with Firefox beta 2) has shown improvements in this area. There hasn’t been a single report of Foxmarks crashing Firefox beta 4 yet; that version was only released yesterday, but we’ve been impressed by how the quality of Firefox keeps marching forward with each release. Beta 4 may well be stable enough for general use with Foxmarks. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

There are also reports of occasional performance problems — sometimes sync under Firefox 3 is really fast, and sometimes it’s quite slow. Surprisingly, this variability occurs on the same computer with the same bookmarks within the same session. We’re not sure what might account for the difference yet, but we’re looking into it.

Overall, testing has gone quite smoothly. As long as we can keep up with the rate at which bugs are reported, we’ll continue to allow more people in to check it out. If you’re interested in participating, you can sign up here. Note that you’ll need a Foxmarks account to register.

P.S. Thanks to the many users who have taken the time to test! Your efforts to find and report bugs make a real difference, and we appreciate it. Oh, how we do.

As promised yesterday, we’ve just released Foxmarks 2.0.45 to the Mozilla Add-ons site (AMO). Existing users of Foxmarks 2.0.43 and below should start seeing update notifications shortly.

Feel free to let us know how things are going here. But please do note that we don’t handle customer support here on the blog; if you’re having a problem and would like assistance, write us here instead. We’re happy to help.