pcorcoran's dashboard

Anders,

Thank you for the suggestion.

In theory this would be a nice feature -- pretty much everyone at Xmarks agrees so. And when we were first designing sync profiles, we originally wanted no restrictions on which folders or items could be selectively omitted from profiles.

But after months of design (and much hair loss) we realized that such a feature is really only tenable in a system where only one set of bookmarks changes at a time before sync occurs -- and this is unfortunately far from the reality of sync.

As it turns out, there are many ways in which the deletion of items, the movement of items, and the alteration of profiles, when effected on more than one computer simultaneously, can result in quandaries where the sync arbiter cannot resolve conflicts without either user intervention or potential data loss.

Obviously potential data loss is out of the question as a design solution.

And in this case user intervention was also in violation of one of our other design goals here, that of "total" privacy. Because profiles are designed to keep your "work" stuff completely separate from your "private" stuff, we can't even send the tiniest bit of info about that private stuff to work, not even to help us sort out sync conflicts.

(In other words, we don't want anybody to be sitting at work and see an Xmarks popup which says "The folder you are deleting contains 'My Other Secret Job', which is not visible on this machine. What do you want to do with it?" In the most extreme case this might even jeopardize somebody's job.)

So... this system of sync profiles is the compromise we arrived at which a) allows us a "totally safe" profiling system, b) doesn't lead to impossible sync resolution, c) can be implemented on more than one browser platform, and d) solves most people's work/home problems most of the time.

cheers,
Patrick
Xmarks Engineering

Hi,

First off, thank you for trying out our "alpha"-grade synchronizer on Chrome. Without feedback from you and the other trial users out there, we'd have a lot more trouble getting to a stable release.

Regarding the bottom status bar issue in Chrome, we are aware of this problem, and we're not happy about it either. Unfortunately the current development version of Chrome doesn't afford us any alternatives. The Chrome team has announced that they plan to provide extension developers (eg. Xmarks) with the tools we need to control this state behavior, but they haven't implemented this feature yet, and they also haven't committed to any dates.

So... we do plan to fix this as soon as we can. But at present, it's not within the scope of what the browser lets us do, so we can't do much about it. Hopefully you'll stick with us until we can get it solved!

thanks,
Patrick

Hi Todd,

I'm not sure I understand your suggestion. Xmarks isn't trimming anything which gets displayed in the Buzz section for a web site. We're altering the formatting a little, to try to highlight the same of the site which is being buzzed about, but that's it.

For example, when I look at http://www.xmarks.com/site/www.getdro... and http://twitter.com/#search?q=getdropbox.com is see very similar results in both places.

Can you show me an example of the kind of trimming you're referring to?

thanks,
Patrick

Hi Linna,

A PIN is a "Personal Identification Number". It's a lot like the code you're asked to supply when you use your bank card at an ATM. You can think of it as a secondary password that is only used for encrypting and decrypting your passwords. (It never gets sent over the internet for any reason, and we don't store it on our servers. That's why you're asked to supply it from memory whenever you set up a new installation of Xmarks.)

Syncing bookmarks does not require a PIN. And older versions of (Fo)Xmarks didn't sync passwords, so they never asked for a PIN.

The fact that you're being asked for a PIN but can't remember ever being asked for one before probably means that you haven't ever been syncing passwords via Xmarks. The machine which is asking you for the PIN is probably configured to sync passwords, whereas your other machines are probably configured only to sync bookmarks.

Please have a look at your Xmarks Settings dialog (by selecting "Xmarks -> Xmarks Settings..." from the Firefox Tools menu.) Click over to the "Sync" tab. Under "Synchronization Types", is "Passwords" checked?

If it's checked, you should uncheck it. You won't be asked for a PIN any more after that, and you should be able to proceed with your merge. As long as none of your machines are syncing passwords you'll never be asked for a PIN.

I hope this helps, and if this doesn't clear things up or if you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to write us back.

regards,
Patrick

Hi Joe,

The short answer to your question is "yes". Install, Sync, Done.

(The fine print says that before you try to sync a new machine, you must of course have an existing account with Xmarks and it must have recently been synced with your bookmarks collection.)

Firefox 3+ on Ubuntu is a configuration we support enthusiastically. So if you are worried Xmarks won't work there, don't be. If you have used Xmarks in the past, it should seem unremarkably familiar on Ubuntu.

It's worth mentioning that a lot of the bug fixes (and new features) we've added to our software over the years have been found by our users who took the time to let us know. We have legions of Firefox users on Mac and Windows who inform us when things don't look right or work right. We have fewer Ubuntu users, though, so we're especially eager to hear about your experiences. (So don't forget to write us.)

cheers,
Patrick

The lock icons on some folders on my.xmarks.com designate special folders which cannot be deleted.

In the case of the toolbar folder, deleting that folder in Firefox will simply cause another one to be created in its place, an event that we cannot safely replicate from our online bookmark manager. And the Unfiled Bookmarks folder (also called Unsorted Bookmarks) is not deletable in Firefox, and hence would be an illegal operation for us to support.

Patrick

My pleasure, Steve.

Avira seems to have a decent track record of cleaning up false positives in their AV client. If we determine that we can't fix this on our side we will open a ticket with Avira, so be sure to keep your Avira client up to date.

cheers,
Patrick

jeck,

If I understood bjanko's problem correctly, he would like to delete the bookmarks stored on our Xmarks servers while also a) leaving open his Xmarks account, and b) leaving intact the bookmarks on his personal machines. Xmarks does not currently support this level of control over account activation and synchronization.

But I want to be very clear that account deletion is a very different matter entirely. When an Xmarks customer deletes their account, all of their account data is removed completely and irrevocably from our servers. We leave no traces of this data, not even in aggregate; there is no "undo" here. The only exception is that the departing customer's username is added to a list of usernames which may never again be used in any of our systems.

You have also touched upon two other points which I would like to clarify if I may:

1. When you say we offer "no way for anyone on the site to access my bookmarks", this is not quite true. If you visit http://my.xmarks.com/ you can customize your account to allow read-only sharing of any or all of your bookmarks, viewable as a web page, as an RSS feed, or as a widget you can put on your own web site.

2. In reference to your bookmarks collection getting "gummed up" from time to time: yes, this does happen occasionally and we are likely just as irritated as you are about this. Please accept our apologies, and know that we are working hard to try to make sure this never happens again. (As it turns out, synchronizing bookmarks across multiple browser platforms is very, very complicated -- hey, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it, right? :) ) To help our customers through such issues we do provide a feature called "Explore & Restore Old Bookmarks". This allows you to view historical snapshots of your collection online (at http://my.xmarks.com/) and export them to a local HTML file. And for these "gummed up" situations, you can even choose to restore your entire collection to a past state which isn't gummed up. (Nice phrase, by the way. We usually hear much stronger language from our customers who experience this problem.)

I hope this helps to clarify the issues somewhat. Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns.

cheers,
Patrick

While this probably won't be very satisfying to hear, the correct answer is... it depends. It depends upon which version of the product you have installed. It depends upon which features you currently have enabled. And it can also depend upon which home page you have chosen for your browser to display each time it is launched.

For example, on the machine I'm using at the moment my browser home page is set to perform a set Google search on startup. Consequently, Xmarks will also ask our servers for additional metadata about my search, since I have the "Smarter Search" and "Site Info" features enabled (under the Discovery tab in the Xmarks Settings dialog.)

As I mentioned earlier, if you have the option of adding a "whitelist" entry to Avira to tell it not to caution you about xmarks.com URLs, that might be a tenable solution for the short term.

Additionally, if you have any detailed log information from Avira about what exactly it deems to be suspect xmarks.com URLs, that would be very valuable to us as we begin to investigate a permanent solution.

regards,
Patrick

Steve,

The Avira warning you describe is triggered when malicious sites use misleading URLs to deceive unsuspecting visitors. For example, the URL http://www-paypal.com/login might look at first glance like a genuine PayPal web site address, but a closer inspection reveals that www-paypal.com is not the same as www.paypal.com. Avira is providing a useful service here.

Unfortunately sometimes Avira reports false positives, as your experiences with Xmarks.com demonstrate. On Xmarks.com we construct our URL like so: http://xmarks.com/site/https://www.ya... Notice the yahoo.com address which appears at the end.

Our software uses this "yahoo.com" portion of the address to keep track of which site you requested information about. But Avira perceives this as attempted URL-misdirection on our part. I can assure you that we are in no way trying to mislead you into visiting a web site you never intended to visit.

I am opening a ticket in our issue-tracking software which describes the Avira problem you've reported. For the time being, you may ignore these Avira warnings when visiting our web site, or as an alternative you may add our web address to Avira's "whitelist" to make it stop reporting these false positives.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

regards,
Patrick

bjanko,

It is true that Xmarks doesn't offer a feature which solves exactly the problem you're describing. Please accept our apologies, and we hope you will still find value in the services we do provide.

We are trying our best to offer as many features as we can to solve a wide variety of our customers bookmarks-related problems. Unfortunately, as a small company we have limited resources and we have focused most of our energy on issues of synchronization and related features. We tend to consider first the features that the majority of our users are interested in using, and in the three years we have been developing (Fo)Xmarks very few people have asked for this feature.

I'll open a ticket in our feature-tracking software which expresses your interest in disabling your account and purging your account's bookmarks data. I cannot make any promises as to when we might be able to add this to the product, but we will give it some thought and measure this request against some of the others we have received.

regards,
Patrick

Adding this feature is on our to-do list. The list is long, as you might expect, so I'm not sure when we'll add it. But it's a great idea.

thanks,
Patrick

Hi Aimee,

We do offer a lightweight read-only version of the bookmarks client. It's designed for mobile devices, but it sounds like this would also work well for your situation.

Log in to: http://mobile.xmarks.com and let us know if that works.

Please be aware that the mobile version is designed to remember your login credentials for a longer period than the regular bookmarks client. So if you are using a shared or a public computer, please remember to log out when you are finished with your session.

cheers,
Patrick

Hi dweiums,

The my.xmarks.com web site should be working for you now in IE7. Please let us know if you encounter any other problems.

cheers,
Patrick

This icon can be disabled. In the Xmarks settings dialog, under the Discovery tab, the checkbox which reads "Enable Site Info" controls the appearance (and behavior) of this icon.

Sorry, the mobile bookmarks site doesn't offer any way to add a new bookmark.

If you use a Mac however, our Xmarks for Safari synchronizer will keep your bookmarks the same between Firefox, Safari, and your iPhone. This is by far the best experience we offer for iPhone users. (Xmarks doesn't yet synchronize with Safari on Windows.)

http://download.xmarks.com/download/s...

We have considered providing a unified Xmarks installer for all browsers on a single OS platform. We haven't any plans to move forward on this yet, but it's definitely an idea with merits and one we haven't ruled out.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Alan,

Thanks for the praise.

Would you be willing to describe your favorite features from Powermarks and tell us a bit about how you used them? Or to look at it another way, what problem was Powermarks solving for you, and how so?

cheers,
Patrick