Bookmark is dead

The core concept of the internet is the hyperlink. Hyperlinks are responsible for navigation, juice spreading (the first version of Google SEO algorithm), sharing and storing content. But just like the prediction of Alan Toffler in the book Future Shock - lost content because of information overload — we are losing our links. Bookmark services are not enough. They have already failed, becoming weird, accumulating useless features, prioritizing recommendations rather than helping users collect and save links.

Delicous 2016: Ads everywhere

In the last few years, major bookmark services closed their doors. The browsers' bookmark system tries to organize links as folders and tags — but again, it’s an old model. Chrome's bookmark system has many usability problems, the main one being that you need to click three times to save one link in a specific folder.

Chrome save link interface

So, why do we insist in this solution? How can we solve the anxiety of having to save links?

A new mental model

Let’s change the concept of storing links. The web is running towards the infinite, and we can’t stop the millions, trillions of links, images, videos and content. The pages you've visited are unique to you, it’s your individual path of hyperlinks. It’s almost like a fingerprint, so it’s impossible to have the same path and order of visited pages as anyone else. Let’s remove this anxiety around losing links and let’s make sure everything is saved in the infinite history of your browser

Of each hyperlink the user clicks on we record behavior, source, contents and bring natural search to our link path.

Having stored all this data about the links, we then use the same approach of Graph Search from Facebook to change how we look up for links. It's closer to the way we remember things: when, how and what you were doing when you visited the link.

Articles that I Read last week

articles = pages with large text content
read = spent more than 3 minutes on the page

Links Murilo sent to me

links = any URL
sent by = sourced by email or chats

links that I found about bathroom

found = source by many clicks
about = the content has this subject

It would be very difficult to lose a link using information of user behavior, period and little content parser. And this is just the beginning: we can make the search extensible. Anyone can write a new type of parser. For example a Dribble extension: knowing the HTML markup of the page could help you find images that you saw on Dribble that had the color red. That would be amazing.

Technological speaking that’s something possible today: we already store a lot of user data, and the natural search was pretty advanced. So please Google, Firefox or any browser vendor: help me navigate my path of hyperlinks and stop creating this old and painful bookmarking experiences.