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Nothing is Permanent in “The Cloud” Or Anywhere Else For That Matter

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Xavier already posted the news about the potential demise of Xmarks, the excellent bookmarking Cloud service that allowed users to sync bookmarks across platforms. The obits are coming in and from the looks of it, many, like I do, feel that the loss of Xmarks will be a big blow. It will also be another affirmation that good ideas, good products, and good services, don’t always survive. But in the end, it is just change. Even in the fast moving mobile tech world, we don’t like things to change that we’ve come to depend on.

But then again, who knows. The 90 day window Xmarks is allowing before it flips the switch, might indeed be enough time for someone to come in and take over the service, even though previous attempts to find a buyer apparently failed. We’ll see.

In addition to the shock of possibly losing Xmarks, the announcement has brought about a slew of blog posts, tweets and what have you about how you can get burned by trusting things to the Cloud. Well, gosh, oh golly. If that’s news to so many, then I guess P.T. Barnum was more than correct.

Nothing in life is permanent, and nothing in world of mobile tech (sometimes I think it moves faster than life itself) should ever give us a momentary sense of permanence or the false sense of security. The demise of Xmarks will create opportunities that others may take advantage of, or maybe it won’t. In either case, users will find new ways to do what they’ve done with Xmarks all along and the world will indeed go on.

I’ll miss Xmarks. It was good. It was reliable. It did the job I asked it to. Not only that, it did that job without me ever having to think twice about it. To me that’s the mark of a great piece of software, and I wish we could see more comings and goings in a similar vein (well maybe not the goings). But I’m guessing something new will take its place within time and life will go on.

7 Comments

7 Comments

  1. Joe

    09/28/2010 at 11:17 am

    I’m sad to see it go, we’ve used and recommended FoxMarks and then XMarks across dozens of computers and and for nearly every browser. I have a feeling delicious will be getting a big uptick in users when XMarks finally shuts down in January.

  2. lion

    09/28/2010 at 6:38 pm

    i don’t like the opinion for the talk

    • ali

      09/28/2010 at 9:53 pm

      I don’t like your comment Mr Lion.

      Xmarks is good – I think this will make people move to chrome.

  3. Mike

    09/29/2010 at 1:45 am

    For all the time and money google spends experimenting with ‘next big things’ and uber-competitive cyber-spaces – maybe they’d be interested to take over x-marks.

    I would think they could make use of the stats somehow of how many times a site was bookmarked, etc by users.

    I for one do not mind my data being mined in a non personal benign sort of way. Especially if it is actually useful.

  4. John in Norway

    09/29/2010 at 11:34 am

    Death is permanent.

  5. Nameless

    09/29/2010 at 3:24 pm

    This is why I don’t like typical cloud computing approaches. (Also see the Danger/Microsoft Sidekick data fiasco that luckily ended in user data recovery after initial projections of permanent data loss.)

    What I want is something that goes between my desktop, my notebook, and any ISPs connecting them. Nothing more. I don’t like relying on third parties any more than I have to.

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