Will Google Revamp Google Bookmarks Now That Chrome Does The Sync?

The latest development channel release of Google Chrome contains the ability to sync the browser’s bookmarks. The feature will let you keep the same set of bookmarks on multiple machines as well as store them in your Google Docs. Interestingly enough, Google already has a web-based bookmark service that goes by the name of Google Bookmarks. I wonder whether the plan is to eventually use Google Bookmarks as the back-end sync destination instead of Docs (a much better fit, wouldn’t you say?). If that is the strategy, then it is my opinion that we should get ready for a huge overhaul to the Google Bookmarks service.

The current implementation of Google Bookmarks is – simply put – outdated. The feature that’s most prominently missing is the ability to share and make my bookmarks public. For a company that’s all about making the next generation communications platform (Google Wave), that’s kind of embarrassing. One of the biggest advantages of keeping my bookmarks on the web with services such as Delicious and Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) is discoverability: I am able to see what tags (labels) others used for a web site and pre-fill their tags to my bookmark, the comments they used for it, as well as related sites that others bookmarked. Google Bookmarks also lacks browser-side import/export functions and doesn’t exactly have the best user interface in the game.

Assuming that the end-game is to use Google Bookmarks as the back-end for Chrome bookmark sync as well as for web access of bookmarks, I think it’s safe to say that the currently outdated service will get a very big revamp in the months ahead. Hopefully we’ll be able to get our hands on an official Chrome for Mac release before then. That, or we’ll see Google Bookmarks dropped and the bookmark functionality folded into Docs.