According to Google's blog post about the beta release, the sync feature has to first be activated on each of your computers where Google Chrome is used. To do this, you'll need to download the beta build of the browser available here. Once installed, click the "wrench" menu (yes, the one with the wrench icon) in Google Chrome and select "Synchronize my bookmarks" from the menu that appears. Sign into your Google account in the dialog box that pops up. If you've already set up Sync on another computer, you'll then be prompted to confirm that your different sets of bookmarks should be merged together. In that case, click "Merge and Sync" to complete the process. Finally, click "OK" when you've finished.

Not only does this feature sync your bookmarks, it also creates a copy of your bookmarks file on Google Docs in a new folder called "Google Chrome." (Wonder what else will go in that folder in the future?)

What's in Store for Sync

For now, the Sync feature is only synchronizing browser bookmarks, but the framework behind Sync is ultimately designed to handle the synchronization of other kinds of browser data as well. As to what sort of data that could be, Google can't provide any official confirmation just yet. However, they did say that you could imagine that "this type of infrastructure could be extended to other types of user data such as passwords" in the future. We'll speculate that it will eventually include those passwords, your browser history, and whatever favorite websites appear as thumbnails on the New Tab page. After all, if Mozilla's Weave Sync prototype can handle those sorts of tasks already, there's no reason to believe that Google couldn't do the same.

Because the new Sync feature uses an XMPP connection to synchronize the changes, changes made on one computer are synchronized immediately to another. Not just quickly, mind you, but immediately. This is possible because XMPP is what's known as a "real-time" communication protocol - the same one that powers Google Talk, the company's IM service.

The use of this sort of technology hints at how Google plans to make their Chrome web browser the core of their upcoming netbook operating system, Google Chrome OS. The new OS will run web applications "in the cloud," a radical change from current OS offerings where many applications are still installed on the computer's hard drive itself. With Chrome (the browser's) ability to synchronize data in real-time between computers, it's easy to see how a cloud OS could operate. It wouldn't matter which machine you used, your data would be available, stored in the cloud, synchronized, and all accessible upon login to your Google account. That prospect is either amazing or terrifying depending on your trust level when it comes to Google. Perhaps it's even both. 

Chrome Gets Faster, Too

While Bookmark Sync is the most interesting feature to debut in the new beta, there are some notable speed improvements to mention, too. The latest build improves performance by 30% since the current stable release of Chrome and by 400% since the very first stable release, as measured by Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests. 

As noted earlier, speed was a major factor in Firefox's 3.6 beta 1, released just this Friday. Both companies are going head-to-head when it comes to browser speed, JavaScript performance and startup times, but no official speed tests have been done yet to compare the two new beta releases.

To download the latest build of Google Chrome beta, head over to the Chrome beta site here. The official beta requires Windows XP SP2 or higher.

1. Mutual reinforcement of user expertise and document quality: A user's expertise in a particular topic depends on the quality of the documents she or he has found, and the quality of documents in turn depends on the expertise of the users who have found them.
2. Discoverers vs. followers: Expert users should be discoverers - they tend to be faster than others to identify new and high quality documents...SPEAR gives more credit to users the earlier they find high quality documents.

After analyzing more than 500,000 Delicious users and 2 million shared bookmarks, the solution produced a set of trustworthy users. No spammers were found in the top 200 recommendations.

While there are obvious uses for SPEAR in shopping and friend recommendation engines, says Noll, "The SPEAR algorithm itself is not restricted to the online world. We imagine to use SPEAR, for example, for estimating the expertise of researchers by analyzing scientific publications. Such publications - whether available as online versions or printed out on paper - provide all the information we need."

Expertise may have an algorithm across all industries. Be first and be fascinating. For more information on SPEAR visit Michael G. Noll's site.

If you haven't yet used Xmarks, you're missing out on one of the better bookmarking services available on the net today. Instead of having you bookmark and share your favorite sites with a network of friends like social bookmarking services Delicious and Diigo do, Xmarks lets you make use of the bookmarks you have saved right in your web browser itself. Once installed on your computer, the Xmarks add-on will keep that bookmark list in sync with any other computers you use, assuming they too have Xmarks installed.

That alone would make Xmarks a useful service, but it doesn't stop there. The company uses the data collected (anonymized of course) to recommend sites to you through integration with Google search. In your search results, Xmarks icons highlight top sites based on how many people have bookmarked them. Hover your mouse over those icons to see quick site info like popularity, rating, and related topics or click though for more details.

Xmarks for Chrome

Unfortunately, early adopters who made the leap to the newest web browser on the block, Google Chrome, have had to go without Xmarks for some time. And it's definitely one of the add-ons which make you question whether going Chrome-only is even really possible. Luckily for this group, the wait may be up: Xmarks has built a version of their extension for Chrome users.

The Chrome extension program is still very much under development - in fact, unless you're running the dev release of Chrome, this feature is out of reach. (See our tutorial on installing Chrome and Chromium side-by-side for another way to play with the latest Chrome features.) But you brave early adopters are now invited to test out the Chrome bookmark sync feature by signing up for the closed alpha program here. As you test the new extension, you can check the Xmarks for Chrome news page for updates on known issues and recent changes. The alpha release doesn't yet support advanced Xmarks features like the discovery features mentioned above, nor does it support sync profiles or running Xmarks on your own server. However, those features will be added in time.

Update! Invites Available!

We spoke with Xmarks and they're willing to give 10 ReadWriteWeb users exclusive access to try the alpha service without having to sign up and wait for approval. To get your invite, be one of the first 10 people to leave a comment on this post. Remember you have to provide your email address (it will not be published).

]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/xmarks_comes_to_google_chrome.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/xmarks_comes_to_google_chrome.php Products Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:21:26 -0800 Sarah Perez Read It Later, a cross-platform browser extension for saving online articles for later reading, has just debuted their newly updated iPhone application. This latest version introduces a number of useful features for voracious mobile readers including support for articles spanning multiple pages, support for sites requiring logins (like WSJ or NYT), new sharing features, and a lot more.

But the bigger news from this company is the release of an API that will allow anyone to build their own Read It Later applications - and not just for mobile, but for any platform.

The Read It Later application on the iPhone, available in both a free and paid version, lets you mark articles you're reading in Safari using a customized bookmarklet. Originally, the installation of this bookmarklet was a bit of a challenge as you first have to save a link then edit it, but thanks to iPhone OS 3.0's introduction of copy-and-paste, the process is much simpler.

With the update to Read It Later version 1.3, iPhone users will have access to a number of new features. Although each one is a minor tweak or upgrade, when combined, the overall experience of using the application is greatly improved.

1) Better Access to Articles: The first of the many changes includes support for multi-page articles. These articles will be detected by the application and combined into offline web and text modes. Also supported are articles that sit behind a paywall or are password-protected in some way - such as those on the Wall Street Journal's site, for example. Now Read It Later can store that content by caching your login credentials so you don't have to enter them again when the app needs to download that content. And while you're reading these saved articles, a new scroll bar makes it easier to navigate.

2) Reading List Improvements: To keep track of your reading list, the new app introduces a "Currently Reading" section where your list of "to-read" articles are tracked. It even remembers your position in every article you're reading! When you finish an article, it's moved to the newly created archive (the "Recently Read" section).

3) More Sharing, Rotation Lock (Pro Users Only): For users of the Pro (paid) version, you'll now be able to share articles to other iPhone Twitter applications like Twitterlator, TwitterFon, and Tweetie. Also added is Evernote, which complements the current list of sharing methods that already included Facebook, Delicious, and email.

Another new feature for Pro users is the ability to lock the rotation of the phone so that it stays put in the viewing mode you want (portrait or landscape) - a feature we wish the iPhone itself would include, to be honest!

The Read It Later API

As developer Nate Weiner explains on his blog, "as a solo developer, it's just not possible for me to develop for every mobile device and browser." That's why he decided to open up his API so others could build apps that do everything his does including tagging, syncing, account management, and more.

Hopefully, this new openness will encourage other developers to step in and help build applications for Palm, Android, Blackberry, and Chrome or implement the good features he hears suggested to him on a regular basis.

There's a good chance that developers will jump on this opportunity - and not just because Read It Later already has a user base of 1 million that grows by 5000 new users per day - that's just one incentive. The other is that API is open for both free and commercial applications, meaning the first (or best) apps developed for new platforms can actually earn money for their creators, just as Read It Later has done for Nate on the iPhone.

To access the API, sign up for an API key here.

For the new iPhone applications, you can download Read It Later Free here or Pro here ($2.99).

Earlier this year, Zotero, which is based at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, opened up the online components to its service when it released the first beta of version 1.5 of its plugin, including the ability to access a backup of libraries online and sync between different computers, as well as some very rudimentary social networking features.

Today's update represents a major step forward from Zotero's first online offerings. Now, users who are working on collaborative projects can finally share their research in an easy, straightforward manner. If you are working on a research project in a group, for example, you can now easily create a new group and all the members of the group can just add the papers and books they found to this new group, including notes and other remarks they added to the new entry.

Sadly, though, Zotero doesn't offer a storage solution yet, so every group member still has to track down the actual documents (the team is looking into adding this function, though).

Groups Make Zotero a Great Tool for Users Outside of Academia as Well

This update will also make Zotero more interesting for users outside of academia. While the service's focus is obviously on making it easy for academic users to manage their research and to create bibliographies, Zotero can also function as a general bookmarking tool for any kind of purpose.

Coming Soon: Recommendations, Storage, Feeds

Some of the most exciting changes to Zotero are still ahead. The team also announced that it expects to roll out a recommendation engine in the near future, as well as a storage solution for sharing attached files (PDFs of academic papers, for example), as well as the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds from public groups and libraries.

Make a Backup!

If you are already using Zotero, we recommend that you back your library up before you update. In our own experience, Zotero updates have never been a problem, but the data you have saved in Zotero so far is probably something you don't want to lose due to a freak accident.

Because the iPhone doesn't allow users to easily copy and paste a code snippet into a bookmark (yet), installing the bookmarklet is a bit complicated, but the company provides a good set of instructions, and installing the bookmarklet shouldn't take more than a minute.

Once you have installed the bookmarklet, you just have to open up your bookmarks folder, click the Read It Later bookmark, and the page will be saved for you. Because your data is saved on the company's server, you can easily sync bookmarks from multiple devices.

In the app itself, you can then read your bookmarked stories in the built-in browser at your leisure. You can also sort your reading list by date, title, or site.

Read It Later's most important feature, however, is that it caches the content of your saved Web pages and lets you read it offline. Thanks to this, you can catch up on some of your reading while on a plane, for example.

Pro Version

The paid version, which costs $2.99 (iTunes link), adds a number of great features to the app, including a 'Tap To Save' bookmarklet that allows you to save any link on a given page (see this video for how it works), a full-screen reader that hides the Read It Later bookmarks, the ability to share links on various social bookmarking services, and an unread count on the apps icon on the iPhone's home screen.

Verdict

Read It Later's closest competitor is probably Instapaper, which also offers a free and pro version (at $9.99). Both apps are very similar, and Instapaper has a dedicated following that swears by the product. We like both apps, and would recommend that you try the free version of both Read it Later and Instapaper to see which one works best for you. For us, Read It Later's 'Tap to Save' bookmarklet is a killer feature in the pro version, but not everybody will really need this.

Where Are the Other Cloud Agents?

Back in December, we wrote about the rise of cloud agents (a term coined by Chris Arkenberg). These agents are automated applications that help us parse through the data swarming around us to provide us with the information we need. At the time, we highlighted a service similar to Tweecious called Twitchboard, another app that also posts the links you tweet to Delicious. According to the Twitchboard site, more services beyond Delicious were "coming soon," but here it is April now, and no others have been integrated. That's disappointing to say the least, but what's even more disappointing is that these sorts of "cloud agents" are so few and far between.

At the time of the previous post, some people missed the overall point, thinking we were raving about a Twitter to Delicious cross-posting app. The truth is, we were excited about this concept of automated agents. Unfortunately, since that time, we've seen very few apps that fit the description. In fact, only a couple of others really come to mind...and to be frank, we're not sure if they even count.

One such service is SocialToo, a "social web companion" which has the ability to automate many tedious Twitter tasks like catching you up on your follows, unfollowing people who didn't follow you back, deleting all your friends, or automatically following people for you. It's the service's automated, "set it and forget it" behavior that we think might allow it to be classified as a cloud agent. Another is "Twollo," a Twitter service that finds like-minded tweeters and follows them for you automatically.

Within the Twitter ecosystem, there are probably slews of others which we just can't think of right now. But do apps that automate tasks within Twitter count as cloud agents? They're not all parsing information to separate signal from noise (well, maybe Twollo is), they're just saving us time. We would love to see some "real" cloud agents emerge that provide more than just automation. We want intelligent cloud agents, too. Know of any?

LookSmart acquired Furl in September 2004. At the time, the company announced that it wanted to leverage the data it gathered about users' online behavior through Furl in order to create better search algorithms for web search. Over time, however LookSmart has withdrawn from improving search and the company sold off its FindArticles search engine to CNET in late 2007. Given that Furl is not part of LookSmart's core business anymore, it only makes sense for the company to offload responsibility for the service. We can't help but wonder if LookSmart actually tried to sell Furl but, given the current economic climate, wasn't able to find a partner that wanted to acquire the service directly.

A Good Fit for Diigo

Diigo looks like a good fit for Furl, as it also provides social bookmarking services at the core of its product. Furl at one point looked like it had a bright future ahead of it, but it never really took off. In February 2008, Furl launched a major redesign of its site, which included interesting new features like cached-copy archiving, export in bibliographic formats, and recommendations. According to Diigo, Furl has about one million users - though, as usual, it is hard to say how many of these are active users.

It is not clear how (or if) Diigo will integrate Furl into its own product, but in the announcement, Diigo stresses that it will release version 4.0 of its service soon. Whether this will already feature some integration of Furl's features remains to be seen. For now, Diigo has released a tool that allows Furl users to easily transfer their bookmarks over to Diigo.

After installing a small Firefox plugin, Facette adds two icons to your status bar - one for bookmarking new pages and one for accessing your bookmarks. The Facette site itself presents both the standard, tag-based view of your bookmarks and Facette's own, more structured data. Because Facette sits on top of Delicious, all your Facette bookmarks are automatically also available on your default Delicious page. Indeed, Facette works by creating a number of new tags in your Delicious library.

Being a research project, Facette is still a little bit rough around the edges, but it looks like a great way to keep your Delicious library more organized - especially when you are using Delicious to keep track of a larger research project. If you decide to use Facette, the developers also request that you sign up for a user study on the homepage, though this is completely optional.

This synchronization feature was already part of Opera's desktop browser, but version 9.7 of the SDK will also give developers the ability to integrate it into their own devices. According to Opera's CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, Opera wants to give operators the ability to create a unified experience across their triple-play offerings and on phones, computers, TVs (or entertainment devices like the Wii).

Opera Zoon

The new version of the SDK also includes Opera's new hardware-accelerated zooming capability for devices with small screens. While not as elegant or intuitive as Apple's multi-touch gestures, Opera Zoom, which saw its debut on the Nintendo Wii, does work quite well.

Syncing Bookmarks as Competitive Advantage

Opera already syncs its bookmarks with the online version of Opera Link, but it would be great if Opera also allowed you to sync with other online bookmarking services like Yahoo's delicious. Other devices like the iPhone also allow users to sync bookmarks between the desktop and mobile phones.

Now that web browsing is slowly becoming a standard activity on mobile devices, being able to keep bookmarks in sync is clearly starting to become more important. Opera is in a good position to leverage its experience in cross-platform development here, though Mozilla and other browser developers are also working on similar projects.

Unfortunately, no one knows when Google will release an update for Chrome that will provide add-on support. But until then, there is a way to at least simulate the use of browser add-ons. This is done using bookmarklets (small pieces of javascript code) which you can easily add to Chrome's bookmark toolbar.

Google Chrome Bookmarklets

Thanks to the blogote web site, there's a useful list of Chrome bookmarklets available which has been updated off and on since September. However, at the time of writing, the site seemed to be suffering from some sort of CSS design issue that had the blog comments overlaid on top of the post, rendering it unreadable. (Update: this has now been corrected).

We decided to recover that data and recreate the list here as a resource for our readers while also adding several additions of our own.

HOW TO: To use the bookmarklets listed below, just drag and drop the link onto your bookmarks bar in Chrome.

• Share in Google Reader - Share the web page you're on using Google's RSS Reader. There's also a Note This in Google Reader bookmarklet which lets you share the item while adding a note along with it.
• Stumble it - Add this link and click on it whenever you want to Stumble a page you liked. Another way of stumbling a webpage can be found here.
• Gmail This - Email any page using Gmail. For Google Apps Mail, try this instead. (You will need to replace "yourdomain.com" with your own domain name).
• Linkify - Convert plain text URL's into hyperlinks
• Socialize - Submit a blog post from Google chrome to more than 50 social bookmarking website with a few clicks.
• Google Pagerank - Since Google toolbar was not available for Chrome, you can't use the toolbar's smart Pagerank system. Instead, drag this bookmarklet and click on it whenever you want to check the Pagerank of any website or blog.
• Twitter now - Drag this bookmarlet to Chrome and  click on it whenever you feel like updating your Twitter account. You'll get a pop up which will let you update your twitter status and check messages.
• Tumblelog - If you own a Tumblr blog then this bookmarklet will allow you to quickly post to your tumblelog.
• Dictionary - This bookmarklet lets you look up words in the dictionary. If you are in need of a Thesaurus, though, just drag and drop this Thesaurus bookmarklet to your toolbar. Another, similar bookmarklet called Reference is available, too.
• Translate - Click this bookmarklet to translate any web page to English. You don't even need to know the source language.
• Post to vi.sualize.us - This bookmarklet posts your favorite pictures to the photo-sharing web site vi.sualize.us.
• Delicious - Save a page to social bookmarking site delicious with this bookmarklet.
• Share on FriendFeed - Share a link to social media lifestreaming site FriendFeed.
• Snipshot - Crop and rotate photos on the web, with Snipshot.
• Digg - Digg a web page using this bookmarklet.
• Clip to Evernote - This bookmarklet saves pages to note-taking application Evernote.
• Take Screenshot - Take a screenshot on a web page using WebShotsPro.
• Google Bookmark - Bookmark a page using Google's own Google Bookmarks service using this bookmarklet.
• Adblock+ - This Adblock bookmarklet removes java, flash, background music, and third-party iframes. It won't render properly on this page for some reason, but you can grab it from the original site.

Bonus!: Get Greasemonkey for Google Chrome - see our previous post for instructions.

As an alternative, Heuer proposes to use a decentralized network based on XMPP, where data is only exchanged between friends and transmissions are encrypted. One might argue that XMPP still relies on servers, though it is surely a more decentralized system than the monolithic reliance on one service provider.

The talk mostly focused on the technical and privacy aspects of sharing semantic data like Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) information through an XMPP network, but it also introduced the Diki bookmarking and tagging application, which you can download and start from here.

Diki

Diki is the first implementation of these ideas and is available as a Java application that allows you to create a new account, import your delicious bookmarks, rate your friends' bookmarks, and which automatically encrypts your communication by using the OpenPGP standard. It's clearly still a prototype, but it raises a lot of interesting questions.

If you want to delve deeper into this topic, you can download the presentation here (PDF), or read the actual paper (PDF). If you have some bandwidth to spare, you can also download this presentation and all others from this week's Chaos Computer Congress from here.

For those of you who don't know, Zigtag is another entry in the social bookmarking collection of tools. Like delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia, Zigtag helps you categorize your bookmarks and share them with others. When Zigtag went into development, bookmarking was all the rage. The company's goal was to make bookmarking easier by adding a layer of semantics to the tags themselves.

Zigtag, you see, understands the meaning of the words you assign to a tag. When you tag to a page, Zigtag actually assigns it meaning rather than just a simple word. If that sounds revolutionary...well, that's because it is. Sort of.

Not the Only Semantic Tagging Service

Because of Zigtag's slow progress, they can no longer claim to be the only semantic tagging application available today. Another, Faviki, also offers an intelligent tagging service based on structured data. Both services attempt to address the problem of user-generated tags. That is, even though what you tag "NY" may be the same link that I tagged "New York," no bookmarking service ever knew the tags were related.

Zigtag and Faviki attack this problem in different ways. Faviki suggests tags for you to use, not from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted from DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting information from Wikipedia.

Zigtag, however, eschews suggestions and lets you tag items as you wish. It doesn't matter what personal system you use for tagging (one word, two words, underscores, plus signs, etc.) because Zigtag understands the meaning of the tags. In Zigtag, a link tagged "New York" is returned along with other links tagged "New_York." Zigtag also understands that one tag may have different meanings and groups those items accordingly. For example, there's a New York and Company clothing store and a New York in England that may have been tagged "new york." That level of understanding is something that's unique to Zigtag and sets it apart from other bookmarking services.

Thanks to the service's ability to understand meaning, Zigtag users can join groups related a shared interest. Since Zigtag knows what you mean by your tags, it is, in theory, easier to find links you would be interested in on Zigtag than with other bookmarking services.

Is This Really Web 3.0?

Zigtag may be one of the first tools to step out of the Web 2.0 box. Where "Web 2.0" implies there is a social element to a service, it's generally speculated that Web 3.0 will bring about the intelligent web. Zigtag delivers this intelligence, but is it enough?

The only downside to Zigtag is that it requires you, the user, to manually insert the tags. In fact, it even relies on user-generated tagging and has built its entire service around that concept. That may be where Zigtag went wrong. Although two years ago, what it offered was ground-breaking and unique, as we enter 2009, we're asking the question: "Is tagging dead?"

At first, collaborative tagging, also known as a folksonomy, appeared to be the future of the web. It was a rejection of the search engine in favor of the community. It was our collective intelligence harnessed for the purpose of applying meaning and order to the pieces of the web in ways that computer-based tools could not.

As time went on, though, the one thing that made a folksonomy appealing - it was made by people! - was also the very thing that gave it problems. User-generated tags were likely to produce unreliable results. Zigtag addresses that problem, but it does not address what may end up being the true source of failure for folksonomy-based systems: people are lazy.

Now that there are myriads of services using tagging, thanks to the explosion of Web 2.0, we're getting sick of all the manual labor involved. Tag your links, tag your photos, tag your blog entries, tag your RSS feeds, etc.

While at one time, a semantic-based tagging system like Zigtag may have seemed like a vision of Web 3.0, we've now come to a point where we wonder if it does enough. It's possible the next revolution of the web won't be a system that understands the meaning of the tags we created, but knows how we would have tagged things if we had bothered to do so and then does it for us. And if that's not the future of the web...well...perhaps it should be.

We'll admit, we were intrigued as soon as we hit Favo's landing page - it was the screenshot of Favo in action that drew us in. With its bookmark browser that looks nearly identical to iTunes' cover flow visualization, Favo looked like the bookmark management tool we didn't even realize we were craving until it was right in front of us.

Over the past year, we've seen several search engines launch featuring visual browsing, but the closest we've seen to a decent visual bookmark manager was the Windows-only Tidy Favorites, and it only did thumbnail-sized screenshots. While visual browsing may look great, it hasn't proved to be a "Google killer" by any means. For search queries on the net, it seems text is still the way to go. However, when dealing with smaller data sets - like our albums in iTunes, for example - visual browsing can find its niche. It only makes sense to integrate this technology with our favorite bookmarks, too.

According to the Favo homepage, the new service will offer several other appealing features as well. Most notably, Favo claims it will be able to automatically label and tag your favorites based on its intelligent tagging engine. Finally! We're so sick of tagging! A service that does it for you is definitely worth a look.

Favo also promises fast search tools, recommendation and sharing features, groups and channels, synchronization between browsers, and even a curious automation feature they're describing somewhat vaguely as so:

"Your surfing experience does not get interrupted by dialogs that ask you to pause and organize the content you are collecting. Favorites are collected from your browser and from your friends' recommendations."

How well this will all work is anyone's guess, since the service hasn't even launched yet. But based on what Favo intends to do, it's certainly worth signing up for a beta invite.