An Xmarks user in the United Kingdom shared a fascinating customer story with us. The story begins with an unfortunate home break-in where one of the stolen items includes a laptop. This user performed an impressive bit of technical analysis, including a supporting role played by Xmarks (BYOS version), that led to the tracking and recovery of the laptop. You can read all the geeky details here!

Just another day in the life of the Xmarks laptop recovery, I mean bookmark sync service. ;-)

Here’s a sneak preview of two feature enhancements coming soon to the Firefox version of Xmarks Sync.

1. Smarter Search Gets a Lot Smarter

We first launched our Smarter Search feature back in April 2009 – automatically placing an info icon next to the three most-bookmarked sites on your Google search results page. We’re proud to announce a new and improved Smarter Search, which we affectionately call “stars and stripes”. Smarter Search now displays more useful information about the websites on your Google page:

• “stars” show you the average rating for a site across the entire Xmarks user community.
• “stripes” tell you how a site ranks within its most popular topic, based on the one billion bookmarks managed by Xmarks.

We’ve been testing this new feature with over 200,000 Xmarks users and so far the feedback has been very positive. But if you’d like to turn the feature off, it’s easy. Just un-check “Enable Smarter Search” in the Discovery Pane of your Xmarks Settings dialog:

Combined with new ways for you to create your own site reviews, we’re excited about our new approach to web search. It will bring people-powered web site ratings and reviews directly to you, helping you search safer and smarter.

Try it out and tell us what you think! We’d love to hear your feedback.

2. New Ways to Review Sites, and Share Your Reviews on Facebook

Thanks to all the Xmarks users creating site ratings and reviews when you bookmark in Firefox. We’re seeing lots of reviews pour in, and that’s helping every Xmarks user get people-powered site reviews every time they search. In version 3.5, we’re making it even easier to create a site review simply by clicking on a row of stars in the bottom right corner of your browser:

Once you click on a star rating, you’ll have the option to write a brief review and share your thoughts, positive or negative, about the site you’re on. Checking the “Share this review” box will automatically post your review to your stream on Facebook. The first time you do this you’ll need to link your Facebook account with Xmarks – after that you can share in just one click.

Just like Smarter Search, we’ve made it straightforward to disable this feature. Simply right-click and uncheck “Show Status Bar Stars” in the menu.

We hope you’ll give this a try and rate some of your favorite sites – you’ll help millions of other Xmarks users discover the best sites on the Web.

One of the things we’re working on here at Xmarks is an easy way to search across all the sites within a folder of bookmarks. Our first step is an experimental feature we’ve added to shared folders – folders of bookmarks that have been explicitly made public via my.xmarks.com.

Starting today, you can use Google to search the sites you’ve bookmarked using the search box on each shared folder page. The search box appears automatically for any Xmarks shared folders. Here’s an example of a shared folder of sites about Movies:

Searching within this folder delivers Google results *only* from the web sites bookmarked in that folder. Here’s an example search within the Movie folder:

You can try this with one of your own bookmark folders by turning on sharing at my.xmarks.com. Just log in with your Xmarks account, click on the folder you want to share, and click the “Share” button in the toolbar. This will give you a URL for a searchable web page for that shared folder, like this:

We think this adds a whole new dimension to bookmarks and creates some interesting new uses for bookmark folders. Where do we go from here? Should this search feature be part of your bookmark folders within the browser?

You can help by trying out bookmark folder search and answering this quick three question survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VN8QSS8

Thanks!
James

We’ve been getting reports of some duplicates and bookmarks moving between folders over the last few months.  We’ve been actively trying to track down this bug, but it’s been sufficiently rare that we’ve been unable to catch the problem in users’ log files, and we’ve never had any success reproducing the problem in-house.  That is, until late last week, when we finally tracked it down!  Needless to say, it’s a lot easier to find and fix something when you can make the error happen in the first place.  So after some swift QA, we’re releasing this version today (3.4.10 on Mozilla’s Add-On site, and 3.4.11 on the Xmarks site) that contains the fix. (Only Firefox users are affected, so no need to worry if you are a Safari, IE, or Chrome user.)

A big THANK YOU to all of you who experienced the problem and were willing to work with us to get to the bottom of it!  You’ve been very gracious and patient, and we are grateful for your support and effort.

We’re also working on a major release that should be coming up in the next few weeks, but we didn’t want to wait to get this important fix out.  So hopefully you’ll forgive the frequent updates when the next one comes out soon!

‘Tis the season for Xmarks awards! This time it’s Laptop Magazine, reviewing Xmarks and crowning us with their Editors’ Choice Award. Click here to read their full review…

Just over a month ago we launched a new Firefox Add-on called SearchTabs. It’s an extension designed for information junkies who want to get the most out of each and every web search, and discover the best sites right on their Google page. We’re happy to announce that SearchTabs is now available for Google’s Chrome browser as well!

SearchTabs is still a work in progress, but we hope you’ll give it a try and send us your feedback. Visit our download page and install it.

We see around one million new bookmarks added to our system every day. By analyzing that fire hose of data we do a pretty good job of figuring out the hottest new sites across a huge range of topics. With our new Topic Alert emails, you can be the first to know about great sites across your favorite topics.

We’ve added a link on all Xmarks.com topic pages labeled ‘Follow This Topic’. Simply click on that link, follow the instructions and you’ll start getting email alerts about your topic. Each week we check if there are new and notable sites about that topic; if so we bundle them up in an email and send it straight to you. To view or change your topic alert subscriptions, simply log in at Xmarks.com and visit your profile page (by clicking on your user name in the top right).

Sign up for a topic alert now at www.xmarks.com and follow your passion!

We may be preaching to the choir on our blog, but we thought you’d like to know that PCWorld chose Xmarks as one of their top 100 best products for 2009.

We ranked #31 overall in the list, and within our software category we made the podium as the #2 best software product for 2009!

Thanks PCWorld, and congrats to our browser buddies Firefox (#42) and Chrome (#58), plus fellow browser add-on LastPass who made the list at #46.

We’re looking for Xmarks users in San Francisco to participate in a usability study that we will be conducting Nov 11th, 12th and 13th. We will be testing some unreleased features as well as improvements to a few existing ones, and are keen on learning what you think!

To participate, you must be an active Xmarks user for at least a month and be available to meet in downtown San Francisco to spend an hour with us on one of Nov 11th, 12th, or 13th. We respect your time and will compensate you with $75 for the hour that you spend with us.

If you’re interested, please write to us and let us know your preferred date and time, and your Xmarks username. We only have 5 slots available for this study, so hurry!

Sign up for the usability study

One of the advantages of processing about a million new bookmarks each day is that we get a pretty good picture of which sites our user community loves and which topics are grabbing their attention.  We think our users have done a great job and we’d like to share some of their best finds with you.

Xmarks has now created a new Twitter account that publishes the hottest new sites and topics.  It’s the XmarksHotList, and it updates a few times a day.

Here’s how we do it.  Each day as new bookmarks stream through our system, we validate them, anonymize them, aggregate them, and score them.  At the end of this process we create ranked lists of the web pages that are spiking in popularity.  Sometimes they’re new diet tips and sometimes they’re the first appearance on the web of an emergent technology.  This is the Xmarks Hot List.

While a number of other sites do a great job of surfacing hot news stories to read, our Xmarks Hot List is composed of the sites, images, videos, and technologies that compelled our users to bookmark them.  These are the pages that people want to save and revisit.

Come follow the XmarksHotList on Twitter and discover great new sites as fast as we do.