Bookmarks in the cloud aren't anything new — but Chrome bookmark sync is merely the first step in the evolution of Chrome into the thin client for a cloud OS. The implications for data portability in a world where the browser is the single point of sign-on for all software services is both exciting and troubling. If a SAAS vendor (like Google) vertically integrates their browser into their software stack, extricating data from that ecosystem might not be impossible, but will most likely be improbable because of the high cost of moving data out of a fully integrated software environment. - Brady Brim-DeForest from FriendFeed MT Plugin

While it's nice to see that Google and Mozilla are integrating bookmark sync into their browser I don't see it as such a huge step towards data portability. The main problem is that both solutions are tied to their respective vendors by using their services. Thus they do not enable a common protocol but instead they are just extending browsers into the cloud. (This is at least as I understand it right now although when I looked back at Weave when it started there was also talk about hosting your own bookmark database. Still this is only a solution for a minority of users) What's needed is really a way for a user to choose where to store bookmarks and having a protocol and API standard for managing that data. Then you might also not add yet another way of storing bookmarks to your already installed solutions like delicious and co. but you can simply reuse those with every browser or even web application. While I welcome any attempts at finding such a protocol I am nevertheless still waiting for people from delicious, Mozilla, Google and others to join forces to create those standards in order to have true portability at some point in the future. Disclaimer: I am on the board of the DataPortability Project but this is my personal opinion. But I think this post is more relevant to the concept than to our group anyway. - Christian Scholz from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Hooray. We do not need 21st century AOLs. - Bob Boynton from FriendFeed MT Plugin