Yesterday, Google announced the beta version (version 4) of their toolbar. Now, this is one of their products that gets me excited.
The new version of Google toolbar has a bookmark feature integrated. I can bookmark frequently visited pages and access them from any computer that has the new toolbar installed. I like its Flock-Star button like feature which gets highlighted each time I visit a page that I have bookmarked before. It helps me to decide if I should bookmark a page or not. My bookmarks will be integrated into Google Search History service – where I can label each of them using delicious-like tagging system. Each label assigned is automatically displayed as a folder in the toolbar (Thus, you can have multiple categorization of sites). Rather than immediately label my bookmark, Google requires me to consciously access its “Manage bookmark” feature which might result in a better classification system.
Unfortunately Google has no “social” feature, where I could share and access other people bookmarks. Such feature allows anyone to contribute to a “common pool” of interesting websites where everybody could benefit. This is where social and private web diverge – social web allows users to leverage on each other efforts creating a bigger network value, while private web serves only the need of their user and service provider. Sadly, if Google bookmark service gets popular, the wonderful idea of sharing diminishes, which is why I won’t replace my delicious bookmark with it (I might use both though).