Your favorite social bookmarking tool, Historious, gets some major improvements.
You might remember when @Zee wrote about Historious back in the middle of July. At the time, he called it the bookmarking tool that he had been waiting for. Since then, many more have found out how awesome Historious is to use and have adopted it heavily.
I caught an announcement by one of the developers, last night, about some updates to the tool and thought I’d share them with you.
Improved Performance
At launch, Historious could only handle a few requests per minute. With new improvements to the hardware behind it, there has been a pretty vast improvement to the capacity of the service, and newly-bookmarked sites should be ready to index almost immediately.
OpenSearch Integration
You can now search your Historious bookmarks right from your browser’s search bar. It’s a pretty welcome addition, for those of us who rely on Historious heavily.
Public Bookmarks and Sharing
One of the most requested features was to be able to push your bookmarks out into the public. Now you’ll be able to publish on any site and your bookmarks will appear in your public Historious page. The page can be broken down into keywords, which is invaluable for those who have literally thousands of bookmarks shared. If you’ve chosen to share your finds, people browsing your page can use the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button to be taken to a random bookmark in the public cloud.
Subscription Plans
Of course, all of this function doesn’t come easy. For power users of Historious, there is now a subscription program that will open up some added features. While bookmarking of up to 1,000 sites is free (and should cover the vast majority of users), you can go up to 15,000 unlimited sites with a $3/month subscription.
The other features? Tagging, no ads and the ability to text search within PDF files. All of these are awesome, but the PDF text search is sure to set a bar.
Overall, these are some great and welcome features to an already-wonderful service. If you’ve not given Historious a try, it’s high time that you do.
Geez, I just started to use it and I have to stop and write a one-click Google Bookmarks Chrome extension! 1,000 sites? What’ve they been smoking?! I add this within less than a month! Their Chrome Extension has been broken for a while and the Russian guy who is (paid to be) maintaining it enjoys life and doesn’t bother to fix it! Worse of all, they are adding tags, which defeats the purpose of using it vs other free tools. I think the whole idea was “one click”! Geez!
Nikolay, we have released a new version of the Chrome extension that disables the buggy source updating. Can you let us know if it’s still not working for you?
Thanks!
Hello!
Thanks for the review, Brad. One minor correction: A subscription gives you unlimited sites, not 15,000.
Nikolay, to address your points:
Everyone is welcome to use Google Bookmarks over historious, of course, if they find that our service does not cover their needs. In reality, very few users have more than 1,000 bookmarks (less than 1% or so, currently).
The Chrome extension has been fixed, as far as we know. If you are having problems with it, please report them to us. Also, the person who wrote it is a volunteer, and we maintain the extension now. It’s open source, though, so everyone can take a look and help us fix problems, if they like, especially someone with experience in writing Chrome extensions.
The tags that will be added serve only to add indicators about what historified pages mean to you, since historious already knows what they are about. E.g. you can tag something as “hobby” or “beautiful” to help you find it again. You will only be able to tag things in the search results, so the one-click aspect remains.
Thank you for your feedback, and if you have any more comments please don’t hesitate to email me personally!
Thanks,
Stavros
Team historious
Updated accordingly, Stavros.
Nikolay: Agreed.
Not a huge fan of historious, but love the concept. Their implementation has been lackluster at best. Every time I’ve tried to use the site, I’ve gotten maintenance mode. In addition, the site limit is quite minuscule. The lack of a decent chrome extension is a huge killjoy, and delicious importing isn’t the best in the world either.
But keep us informed, TNW!
Hello Derek!
I’m sorry you don’t like the service. In the past month we’ve only had maintenance mode twice, once when upgrading the backend (for a few hours) and once when adding payments (for a few minutes), so it’s unfortunate that you hit on those. They aren’t the rule, by a long shot, though.
I’d appreciate it if you could email us with the problems you are having with the current version of the Chrome extension, as all the problems have been fixed, as far as we know.
I would also appreciate if you could let us know what’s wrong with the importing, as we have never had anyone complain about it before.
Thanks again for your feedback!
Stavros
1,000 might be less than 1%, but people just started to use your service. I add around 1,000 links a month into a system of mine I developed as neither delicious, nor any other system works for me. If I spend 5 minutes describing a bookmark and wondering what tags to pick… I’d rather not bookmark at all. Sorry, but 30 bookmarks/day x 5 mins/bookmark > 2 hours/day!
I like faviki, but they still require a lot of work and haven’t improved much (if at all) in years. But you can’t beat free, can you?
As it seems nobody can really solve my problem, I will have to roll one bookmarker out myself.
Seems that this is the first time I have the feeling of totally missing the point of a TNW article.
I’d say the features of Historious look promising. Especially to forget about filling in tags, comments and other stuff certainly is a thing I’d like to see from a bookmark service.
I haven’t been able to test it though :-o
When I discovered the limit of the free plan I’ve had almost the same thought like Nikolay.
Most people don’t have more than 1.000 bookmarks, that’s true, and I personally do not bookmark a lot of stuff over the month. But to be honest “Historious” sounds to me like: “hey did you ever forget about that cool site/service/game/song you found seven years ago: here’s the perfect solution to find it again fast” (I might be wrong here…).
So what I did when signing up and going to look around, doing some testing, play with it a bit, I’ve simply imported the bookmarks of ONE (1) of the several bookmark services I’ve used over the years.
That has been the beginning and the end of my testing…
My oldest bookmark service, del.icio.us, contains just 1.600 entries. Yes “just” – because most of the people I know seem to belong to the above mentioned 1% and many of them have far more bookmarks than me (If Ma.gnolia wouldn’t have suffered from their capital data loss I probably would have gotten a flashing red warning light in front of me after the import…)
Personally I am not going to pay 3 bucks per month to store my bookmarks. I’m not going to complain here though as a good service might be worth its price. But to be honest: I don’t believe that there are enough people willing to do that to see some ROI.
But as I said before: I might be wrong.