We’re back from the DEMO conference and our successful launch of Xmarks. As we prepare to roll out Xmarks to our current Foxmarks users, we could really use your help: please upgrade to Xmarks today, try our new discovery features, and send us feedback.
We’re also hard at work on sync, and to that end, we need your help to prioritize the many items on our sync roadmap. Please take a minute and answer a short survey – it’s your chance to have a voice in how we evolve our product.
I have some exciting news to share with you. Today, March 2nd 2009, we’re launching our new name and service: Xmarks. I’m actually at the DEMO conference in Palm Springs writing this post.
It’s clear that Safari users love Foxmarks for Safari. In the last three weeks, we’ve had close to 100,000 downloads and lots of great press. We’re happy to be serving an important need for Safari users, and so were even more delighted yesterday when we found that many of you had started using Foxmarks on Apple’s freshly released Safari 4 Beta.
As part of all the excitement around the new browser, many of you have written in to us (and on Twitter) asking about Foxmarks compatibility and support for Safari 4 Beta. So without further ado, here are answers to the most frequently asked questions:
We just released Foxmarks 2.7.2. This release includes the new Suggested Tags feature as well as several bug fixes since our last release in November. Firefox users will see an upgrade notice in the next couple of days.
We first made the Suggested Tags feature available on our blog a few weeks ago. Since then, we’ve improved our recommendation algorithm to return even better tag suggestions.
Learn about Suggested Tags from our earlier post about this feature.
February 13, 2009
6:39 pm
Posted by: gaurav
33 Comments
Categories:
Bug Fixes
Foxmarks
Localization
Mozilla
New Features
Places
Service Outages
I want to share with you our motivations for extending our sync service beyond Firefox. First, we’ve received an enormous number of customer requests to support other browsers and we always try to act on feedback from our users (like we did with password sync). Secondly, we’re seeing an industry-wide phenomenon of consumers using more than one computer. With the ‘netbook’ era upon us, more and more people have a need to stay in sync as they access the Web across multiple devices.
At Foxmarks, our belief is that the best sync solution is one that spans all major browsers and operating systems (and yes we plan to support Google Chrome in the near future). It gives you, the user, the maximum choice and flexibility now and in the future.
Supporting these new platforms has not been easy. It has required us to solve unique engineering challenges with the respective browsers and operating systems. With so much complexity, there is no way that we could have released a high quality product without the help of thousands of beta testers. We send you our warmest thanks for your continued help and support.
In preparation for this big launch I made a trip to Washington DC to present our new set of products to Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, one of the most influential technology journalists in the world. In the days that followed, I can’t tell you what a challenging and rewarding experience it was having our product tested by Walt. He found several issues (that have now been fixed) as he worked to thoroughly explore all the features of Foxmarks while synchronizing across 7 computers and 12 different browsers! Walt’s conclusion:
Read the complete review on Walt’s All Things Digital blog.
I hope you like our new products that bring Foxmarks to all major Web browsers. For all you IE and Safari users out there wondering why it’s still called “Foxmarks” I’ll let you in on a secret – we’ll be changing our company and product name soon! Please stay tuned…
Regards,
James Joaquin
CEO, Foxmarks Inc.
We are excited to announce Suggested Tags, a new feature that will recommend a list of relevant tags each time you bookmark a site.
What makes this feature especially useful is that you can instantly find tagged bookmarks by typing tag names into the Firefox 3 location bar. This is one of the quickest ways to organize and recall bookmarks in Firefox 3. However, if you don’t use tags, you can turn off this feature via Foxmarks Settings.
Suggested Tags is currently available only for the Firefox browser and suggests only English tags. We will add support for other browsers and languages in the future.
We aren’t releasing this feature as an automatic upgrade yet, but you can try it out early by downloading it right here:
So how does it work? As you may know, Foxmarks manages over half a billion bookmarks every day. We’re now putting this data to work for you by analyzing this giant collection of information to determine the best tags for your bookmark. As always, we are careful to protect your privacy and our algorithms will never expose any personally identifying information.
We hope Suggested Tags helps you better manage your bookmarks. Give it a spin and let us know what you think!
January 27, 2009
5:30 pm
Posted by: gaurav
34 Comments
Categories:
Foxmarks
Localization
Mozilla
My Foxmarks
New Features
Places
Service Updates
UPDATE: All slots have been filled, but if you’re interested in participating in future studies, please sign up via the link below. Thanks to all who signed up!
We’re looking for Foxmarks users in Seattle to participate in a usability study that we will be conducting the first week of February (2 - 6). We will be testing some of our latest features as well as improvements to a few existing ones, and are keen on learning what you think!
To participate, you need to have been a Foxmarks user for at least a month and must be available to meet in the U-District or alternatively, somewhere in the greater Seattle metro area to spend an hour with us the week of Feb 2 - 6. We respect your time and will compensate you with $75 for the hour that you spend with us.
If you’re interested, please write to us and let us know (a) the times when you’ll be free that week , (b) if you are able to meet in the U-District or where would be most convenient for you and (c) your Foxmarks username. We only have 5 slots available for this study, so hurry!
UPDATE: Downtime completed; thanks for your patience!
Foxmarks will be mostly unavailable Friday, January 16th, 10am-11am PST. We’ll post here once we’re back up, and we’ll also post updates in our Get Satisfaction forums.
During this downtime, sync will not work, and most Foxmarks website access will be unavailable. (The Foxmarks blog will also likely be inaccessible.)
If you have any questions or concerns, please post them at Get Satisfaction.
Thanks for Foxmarking!
We’re excited about the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1, and so are you: though Firefox 3.1 is currently in beta and isn’t scheduled to launch until the end of Q1 2009, many of you have already written us asking to make Foxmarks compatible with the new version. We are happy to say that we have verified that the current version of Foxmarks (v2.6.0) available on the Mozilla Add-ons website is compatible with Firefox 3.1 beta!
To make it official, we have updated the Mozilla website and wanted to let you know that we will now provide support for Foxmarks on Firefox 3.1 beta.
We also have a new version of Foxmarks that contains a handful of small bug fixes. We’re holding off on pushing this to the Mozilla website so that we don’t annoy everyone with such a minor update, but if you’re interested, here’s the link to download it:
In the spirit of adhering to best of breed email policies, we’ve added a preference to your Foxmarks account that allows you to opt-out from receiving emails from us. You can also access this setting by
clicking on unsubscribe links that will be displayed in emails from Foxmarks.
We’ve also made a minor adjustment to our privacy policy to clarify when and for what purpose we can send you emails. This change includes an explicit statement that we will not sell your email address to 3rd parties. View our entire privacy policy, or view just the changes from the last version.
We’ve never been chatty over email (most people have only seen a single email from us) and we plan to keep our messages to you focused and relevant to having the best Foxmarks experience possible.