Future of the browser

A while back there was a post by a Firefox driver asking where Firefox
should go- for people not to list smaller, faster or more stable but to
imagine what could be done. The question proved more difficult than I
imagined. Firefox had made my browsing incredibly simple. A letter, an
arrow key, and enter would often take me where I wanted to go after
which I didn't think about the browser and concentrated on content. I
realized that bookmarks for places that I visited infrequently were
still difficult.
Even with good titles bookmarks were still difficult to distinguish,
categorize, and browse. They were also one of the slowest and most
memory and focus demanding of the usual browser tasks. This resulted in
my not wanting to create them as it would only make the list longer and
interrupt what I was doing by categorizing it and forcing me to choose
a magic title. There was also another problem with bookmarkds that was
getting steadily easier with computers in general. Deleting files tends
to be something we do less of. Hard drives are larger, file navigation
is easier, version tracking (within programs) is better. With the
steady rise of internet web sites and the fact that as a user spends
more time on the internet they have more sites they want to remember
there is an increasing need for bookmarks. This means that bookmarks
need more deleting to avoid problems due to irrelevance, similar
titles, and broken links. Even if they were all relevant deletion would
still be needed to minimize the problems of navigation. I would also
say that looking for a specific bookmark and seeing all the other ones
that I half remember was distracting. I got sidetracked into wanting to
see what is happening with another site.
There is also the issue of making bookmarks public. People need to have
a way to link and provide meta-information about other sites or current
topics.
How do you do create bookmarks in a way that is efficient,
customizable, and fits in with your online presence?
I was unable though to figure out how to make things better.

Luckily people are on the job.
Google now records individual's searches. I haven't had a chance to
evaluate but the ability to search your search history is a very
strong. Its connection to the fabric of everyday use also gives it an
advantage that none of the other services will have. Any service like
Technorati will force the user to choose its service, while Google
steadily moves to being one interface for everything. Being Google it
also has the ability to bring in a number of users that will dwarf the
other communities. Its problem is that it doesn't allow the viewing or
searching of other's people history. The pause feature may indicate
that this will come. A minor weakness, shared by others, is an
inability to add your old bookmarks but this could be corrected with a
simple script.
Between Google and blogger all the elements are there but aren
I have briefly looked at StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Technorati. They
may not be primarily about bookmarking or may not seem to be about it
but this is the future. Collective intelligence both automated and
manual will become the only way to maintain indivual memory and will
also provide ways to expand these memories. Right now they are not
well-suited to the long tail which is precisely where bookmarks are
deficient. A contributor to this problem is that none provide a
permanent location for results.
The unfortunately-named Technorati allows users to create watchlists of
blogs and search on current topics. The search is slow and poorly
implemented. My search on “translucent concrete” prioritzed results
with these words separate above those together. The help showed no way
to couple them. More critical is that a watchlist is something that
people want to check frequently and for this RSS feeds are much easier
to use. It does provide a good combination for fine-grained and general
searching.
Even more unforturnately-named, Del.icio.us (somewhat like Flickr) is
more link based and provides an HTML interface for finding new links on
a topic. Wisely it provides no distinction between results that belong
to a category and those which come from a person. It doesn't implement
search.
StumbleUpon is a Firefox extension and a web service. The idea of
StumbleUpon is to guide users to new websites that are well rated by
similar users. It presents a toolbar allowing a user to give a thumbs
up or down for a site. This then causes the rating to display when the
site is visited, enters a favorite in the user's online profile. If the
site has never been rated by a StumbleUpon user- this typically happens
with very small sites and permanent links within larger ones the user
is asked to give a description for it. StumbleUpon automatically places
it in a category.
A user selects a category and clicks StumbleUpon which sends him to a
highly rated site, within the category, that he hasn't seen before. Or
the user can go to the profiles of friends or users that StumbleUpon
has rated as being similar to him and see the links they have selected.
The bookmarking has some good features- it has the highest ease of use
of any tool I've used. The extension automatically (and insecurely
)logs in and the majority of the time all the user does is make a
click. The worst case, where the user has to enter a title in a pop-up,
is easier thany to the typical browser case because it doesn't have to
be categorized. These links are created on a web for the user that
anyone can access regardless of browser.
There are still a host of problems. The links are not on a consistent
page- as bookmarks are added they will be placed on another page. The
categories that are entered for sites can not be used on individuals
pages for sorting. The only sorting is chronological and they can not
be searched. They are not available offline but I don't think this is
generally a problem.
It is frustrating because none of these problems are inherent to this
type of service. StumpleUpon could be: an easily-used bookmarking
device that uses collective intellegince to add meta-information, an
innovative site-finder, and a community builder. At this point I've
used StumleUpon a few times to get sites similar to the ones I like and
the others not at all, none of them are as easy to retrieve as the
insufficient in-browser bookmarks.