Reuters
Livewire: Putting Your Bookmarks on the Web

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Wynne Harper lives by her bookmarks. Harper works as a community manager at Intuit (http://www.intuit.com) in Mountain View, Calif. In her job, she supervises a staff of content experts who maintain 120 stock and personal finance message boards on Intuit's Quicken.com (http://www.quicken.com) Web site.

Remembering the URLs for all those message boards is impossible, so Harper lists the Web addresses in the "Bookmarks" folder on her Netscape Navigator browser software. That way no page is ever more than a click away.

When the hard drive on Harper's computer died recently and wiped out everything stored in it -- including her bookmarks -- it could have been a disaster.

But the day before, a friend told Harper about a service called Backflip (http://www.backflip.com) that lets people store links to their favorite Web sites online. Luckily for Harper she signed up for the service that day. So after her hard drive blew, instead of wasting an entire workday reconstructing all those links, she used a borrowed laptop go to online to her Backflip account and retrieved the entire list.

"It saved me a lot of time," Harper said.

Backflip, which launched on Nov. 29, is the latest company attempting to do for bookmarks what Hotmail did for e-mail. That is, put them on the Web where people can access them no matter where they are or what computer or other electronic device they're using.

Giving people access to their favorite Web sites is just the beginning. Companies offering free online bookmark managers such as Backflip, Blink (http://www.blink.com), Clip2 (http://www.clip2.com), ClickMarks (http://www.clickmarks.com) and HotLinks (http://www.hotlinks.com) also maintain they make it easier for people to organize and search for their favorite links. Some give users the option of putting links in public folders they can share with others.

As popular as Web browsers are, people don't use browsers' bookmarks feature. Or if they do, they rarely take the time to organize them.

Those are the words of Tim Hickman, and he should know what he's talking about. Until Hickman and partner Chris Misner started Backflip in June, they worked for Netscape, where Hickman had been the company's browser product manager since 1995. I

n a study Hickman and Misner commissioned after starting Backflip, they found that 26 percent of the times Internet users perform a Web search, it's to find a page they've seen before but forgotten how to get back to. To solve the problem, they created a service Hickman calls "a Yahoo just for you."

Like Hotmail, Backflip and its competitors are Web-based, which means people don't have to download software to use it. Instead, they register at the company's Web site to create an online account where they can store and organize their existing bookmarks and add new ones.

Backflip adds a small icon to the toolbar found on Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer. When a subscriber visits a Web site and decides to bookmark it, they click on the icon, which opens a small window they can use to add a description of the URL and file it into a folder in their account. Subscribers can search their bookmarks using a simple search window that appears in the upper right-hand corner of their main account page.

The early response to online bookmark managers appears to be good. Though Backflip's Hickman won't say how many people have signed up for the private San Francisco company's service in its first week, those members have bookmarked more than 1 million URLs, he said.

At Blink, which launched on Oct. 6, officials are expected to reach 100,000 subscribers by Christmas.

"It's been incredible. Traffic to our Web site has tripled in the past 48 hours," said Neil Somerfield, vice president of sales and marketing for the private New York company.

In addition to letting people store bookmarks online, Blink gives them the option of sharing links with other people.

"It isn't that much of a stretch to think of what we're doing as competing with America Online (http://www.aol.com)," Somerfield said. "On AOL, you're force fed content and advertising. We give you the tools to create your own personal AOL."

The number of online bookmark managers continues to swell. Two more companies, Octopus (http://www.octopus.com) and BookmarkCity (http://www.bookmarkcity.com), are expected to launch in the near future.

At least two companies are taking the personal portal concept one step further.

Yodlee (http://www.yodlee.com) and VerticalOne (http://www.verticalone.com) offer one place where a Web user can access, also at no charge, all of their Web-based accounts, including e-mail, bank accounts, bills, travel services, and online news. Yodlee is marketing its service directly to consumers, while VerticalOne is selling its all-in-one service through Internet service providers and other groups such as BellSouth, Web-based e-mail provider USA.Net (http://www.usa.net), and online calendar and event planner company AnyDay.com (http://www.anyday.com).

(Michelle V. Rafter writes about cyberspace and technology from Los Angeles. Reach her at mvrafter@delta.net. Opinions expressed in this column are her own.)

Reprinted by permission. © Reuters 1999.