Historious: The bookmarking tool I’ve been waiting for has finally been built. What took so long?
I don’t get it.
Social Bookmarking tools have been around for years now. We’ve had Delicious, Diigo, Pinboard and a host of others; all with their own mindsets, variations and feature enhancements but none with the two features I’ve continued to wait for; full text search and slick quick super-fast bookmarking. Finally, both features are here, packaged in a new web app called Historious. What took so long?
Historious is delightful already; lightweight, simple, nothing fancy, many of the things that are beautiful about Pinboard, but it has the ability to bookmark in a flash and be able to search for ANY word in the pages you’ve bookmarked.
If you’re anything like me, you’re rarely bothered with tags, inserting descriptions or whatever else. You might just remember one or two words from an article you’ve read, or possibly a quote of some sort. THIS is why Historious is so useful. Bookmark a page using Historious’ bookmarklet (no extensions required) and seconds later you can search any word from that page or any other page you’ve previously bookmarked from historio.us.
One of Safari’s best features is that indexes all the pages you visit so you can search back and find anything you’ve visited since you last cleared out your history. With Historious, sure, you need to click a button but at least it makes it that much easier to find that a page when you might be looking for frequently used words in a number of different pages. Whats more you don’t need to stick with Safari and it’s saved on the web and accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.
Give it a try, see how find it. There’s no sync from other bookmarking sites just yet but you can import your browser bookmarks and bookmark files from other services like Delicious.
To conclude, I sit here realising that I’ve written a particularly positive review, something that I don’t do all that often. I may currently just be blinded by the excitement of finally getting hold of two features I’ve been calling out for for years and if I am, by all means call me out on it. I assure you you’ll find me back here updating in no time with a few gripes I discover over the next few weeks of usage.
What about Google Bookmarks? It uses a bookmarklet and provides full-text searching of bookmarked pages. Has done so for a while now, if I recall.
wow, you’re right and I feel like a plonker. Aside from the design and the fact that you can’t bookmark all that fast with Google Bookmarks, it is in fact identical. Very good call! Not sure how on earth I missed that.
That said, importing bookmarks from your browser using GBookmarks is a serious pain. It only imports through the Google Toolbar, which is only available for Firefox and IE. So if you use Chrome or Safari and want to import your browser bookmarks into GBookmarks, you have to export them to an XML file, import the XML file into Firefox, install Google Toolbar, and then use it to sync with Google Bookmarks.
I have no idea why Google made this so convoluted—especially for Chrome, which has a Web sync feature that works with Google Docs. Why sync Chrome bookmarks with Google’s office suite and not its bookmarking service? It makes absolutely no sense to me.
Almost the same, yeah, but Historious is simpler and is actively developed. Google Bookmarks seems to be an abandoned project – I expected Google Chrome to work with it, but, no, Chrome uses Google Docs – yuck!
What a plonker! (what’s a plonker, zee??)
lol, a friendlier way of saying idiot :)
I like to crowd source popular sites around a topic. Delicious is great for that. Historious? I don’t see any features like that at all. Not fully baked yet IMHO.
Hello! I’m a developer for historious,and I’d like to thank you for your kind words, we are very glad you liked the service!
A few things:
Most bookmarking services provide an “export” link, which you can then import to historious from the same place you can import your browser’s bookmarks. Just upload the file, and it will work.
In fact, we are having some issues now, due to too many people uploading their bookmarks. We are working on a new backend which should be about twenty times faster, and uploading will be reenabled again soon, hopefully in a few hours!
Again, thank you for your review, and if you need anything you can reach us on support at historious or @historrific on Twitter!
Diigo has had full-text search and one-click bookmarking for a long time.