I have used Yahoo `My bookmarks' service before and many of my older bookmarks are still there. Recently, I have accumulated at lot of them in my local instance of Firefox and decided to merge Yahoo set with local Firefox bookmarks (which are sometimes private) and my public set of del.icio.us bookmarks. Well, today is day I abandon one more Yahoo service - at least two things are broken with Yahoo bookmarks.
First, it cannot render Russian text in folder names (which are in UFT-8 of course) - their page uses in ISO 8859-5 character set if my Yahoo language is English, and if it is is set to Russian, page is displayed in KOI8-R set.
Second, there is a limit of 1000 bookmarks and folders. I am just over 600 and I have not yet merged my del.icio.us set.
"But why would not you just put everything into del.icio.us?" - the reader can ask. Well, two reasons.
First, some of my bookmarks are private: they can have embedded usernames, or names of financial services
I use, my page at various online services (like ebay), or even a random USPS tracking page.
These together give enough personal information about me.
Second, I prefer folders for my bookmarks, not tags. I know that tags are all the 2.0-ness of the web,
but I like to establish hierarchy of my data and follow it.
I have nothing against tags _and_ folders: for example, I can store all my links to books and films in folder and use tags with name of director or perhaps things like `unread' or `musthave'. But I want to be able to browse by bookmark type, not just search by tag.
To me, tags are bad substitute for typology of data (what is it?), private markers (displaying qualities I store) and cross-references (when I want to file thing into multiple folders.)
So why no browser I have seen has bookmark search facility, may I ask?
And what would my readers recommend as a substitute for not-so-good Yahoo bookmark facility?
Perhaps there is a way to mark del.icio.us bookmark as private? Perhaps one can make
Firefox use it automatically for all bookmarks? (I know there are extensions to use del.icio.us with Firefox.)
And maybe there would be a way to make metadata private (for example, I can be ok with others seeing which films I bookmarked, but I do not want them to see my notes of people I watched them with.)