January 24, 2002

Who needs bookmarks?
Recent discussion on WebWord talked about how some folks are using Google instead of bookmarks. When I first discovered Google (they were in "beta"), I made it a personal mission to tell everyone I knew about it.

My new mission is to tell folks about Powermarks, a really great utility that is so much better than Google for returning you to your previous haunts. It's better than bookmarks because you don't have to think so much about organization. I mean do you really want to create a whole taxonomy for your bookmarks (aka favorites)? With bookmarks, I could never figure out where I put things, plus navigating through the various folders took too long. Powermarks allows you to do a very fast search of things you've "powermarked", and it also lets you add metadata (keywords) to each entry. It ends up being faster and more accurate than Google (really). Since all my hundreds of Powermark entries are for web pages that have already passed my "smell test", I can generally find something useful without having to scan very many search results. It's also great for those times when I think "didn't I read something about this once?" -- I can quickly find it in my powermarks.

Someone mentioned Powermarks once on CHI-Web or SIGIA, and It's really changed the way I work ever since. I can retrieve information much faster than I ever did before. For example, in a matter of seconds, without opening any new browser windows, I just looked up the URLs for CHI-Web and SIGIA. Since it's a desktop app, there's no network or page load delay...yes, native apps are still good for something!

Oh, and one of the really cool things the software does is synch your "powermarks" between PCs!

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