xmarks

I mentioned a few weeks back about several services that had been popular in the past but were now shutting down: Vox, BlogRolling, Xmarks and Bloglines.

Unfortunately, Vox and BlogRolling both bit the dust at the end of September and October respectively. But the future is much brighter for the other two.

Xmarks has a new owner and will be launching a premium service in addition to the current free service, so it’ll be around for some time. I don’t currently use it, but seeing as I can only run Safari on my iPhone (and the Firefox Home app is a little clunky) having my Firefox bookmarks available in all browsers could be beneficial, so I may sign up.

And Bloglines has had a stay of execution. Presently it’s run by Ask.com, part of the IAC group; IAC will still own it but it will be moved to another part of the business. Either way, it’s probably a big relief to those still using the service and who may have been apprehensive about moving to an alternative like Google Reader.

Finally, yes I know the picture at the top has nothing to do with this article but it’s a nice recent picture of Bradford, in the new and underutilised Urban Garden.

This month is turning out to be what Anil Dash calls the end of ‘Web 1.5′ – services which started before the ‘Web 2.0′ bandwagon started rolling, have not been popular for some time and are now closing.

I’ve already mentioned Bloglines, and to add to that there’s BlogRolling, which is “probably shutting […] down soon”. BlogRolling is another service that I used to use but haven’t for many years; it let you keep a list of blogs that you read (a ‘blogroll’) and allowed you to sort and categorise them easily. It made sense in the early days when people were using services like Blogger, but packages such as WordPress make this dead easy now. Its one stand-out feature was being able to show which blogs had recently updated, but this was before RSS/Atom feeds really took off and once I had switched to a feed reader I didn’t see the point of staying with the service.

Xmarks, which allows you to synchronise your bookmarks/favourites between multiple browsers on different machines, is also due to stop operating in around 9 months time. The blog post explains why in full, but essentially they were unable to build a viable business around a free service, and there’s increased competition now that Google Chrome has sync built-in, as will Firefox in its next major update (it’s already available as an add-on).

I’ve also already mentioned Vox, Six Apart’s community blogging service which also closes at the end of this month.

It’s perhaps a shame that these services are going under. Bloglines, BlogRolling and Vox have all stagnated for some time and it’s therefore no surprise that they’ll soon no longer be around. As for Xmarks, it’s a pity that they didn’t offer a ‘freemium’ service, or switch to a paid-for model; while the new sync services in Firefox and Chrome are good, Xmarks was one of the few ways of syncing bookmarks between different browsers.

I’m wondering who will close next.

Update: MSN/Windows Live Spaces is closing and its users are being moved to wordpress.com.