Foxmark or Del.icio.us?

I've always taken care of synchronizing my bookmarks (and also other personal data, such as email, etc.) with a central repository, since I'm using several computers and laptops and I want to able to access them anywhere. Lately, I had been using the firefox bookmark synchronizer extension, which relies on a HTTP or FTP server. This had also the advantage to make the bookmarks publicly available. The HTTP server, where the main bookmark copy was stored, crashed, and I did not feel to reinstall all the webdav stuff just for my bookmarks. Moreover, I had heard of new free services for storing bookmarks. I must admit I did not perform a deep research and I only ended up with two names to try: Foxmark and Del.icio.us.

The latter is surely more than a bookmark synchronizer: it's oriented to share your bookmarks with other people and to tag them with as many tags as you see fit; social networking.

Foxmark is "just" a bookmark synchronizer... but it does its work really well! The foxmark site offers the space to store the main bookmarks replica (though you might use your own server). The synchronization works pretty well and it does not seem to require a lots of bandwidth (I've also tried it with a slow modem connection and it does seem to work fine). Moreover, the synchronization takes place in background and it is performed when required (e.g., you change your bookmarks; well, the synchronization policy is smarter, and you can read more about that at the foxmark site). If you exit Firefox and your bookmarks were not synchronized, you will be warned about that, and you'll have the chance to perform synchronization. Finally, your bookmarks are still your bookmarks (you still have the bookmarks.html file). Unfortunately, for the moment, the bookmarks cannot be made public... hopefully this feature will be added some day.

Del.icio.us... well... the first impression was not good... all the bookmarks are twisted in a flat manner, no hierarchies anymore... only tags... probably I still haven't got used to tags, but I prefer the tree structure. I was also willing to try it for some time, but when I then tried to export the bookmarks from del.icio.us I realized that the tree structure was lost forever... argh... no way... for the moment I'll stay with foxmarks.

But I'll try to get a little bit more into social networking and del.icio.us :-)