Do people still use browser bookmarks? With social media, it may seem like there is no need for bookmarks. But there are several key uses.
Bulk load for surfing
Every morning, I load up about 10 websites that don’t have RSS feeds. They are all inside one bookmark folder, so I can right-click on the folder and do a “Open All Bookmarks”
In addition to the one daily folder, I have several other daily folders, each with about ten bookmarks. (Each are labeled d1, d2, d3, d4). Depending on how much I want to explore, sometimes I’ll load all three folders, sometimes it’s just one.
Utility
The most common use today for bookmarks are for the pages that you frequently visit. (obviously). Now an added benefit of bookmarks is when you can just start typing the title in the URL bar to load the page. Some fun ways of saving some time with this type of use:
- Google Drive documents. Why load up drive.google.com when you want to go directly to the actual doc? There are several that I frequently use throughout the day. I like typing just the first couple words in the URL bar to bring them up.
- Google maps search. Bookmark your home and work address in Google Maps. When looking up directions, type in the start of the address in the URL bar, and it brings up that specific page for your address.
Bulk load for research
When I have a question I want to ask the internet, I’ll right-click on my “questions” folder to load up the following sites: Yahoo Answers, Quora, Ask Sparxmind, Linkedin, Reddit, Google Plus, @weeklyquestion on Twitter.
Bulk load for data entry
When I enter my weight I right-click on my “weight” folder to record my weight into Livestrong and Fitbit.
Sequence of pages
When starting a new project sometimes you need to visit a set of sites in a specific sequence. Back when I was building affiliate sites, I had a series of bookmark folders that would guide me through each step.
Bookmarklet
The bookmarklet is fantastic and has several uses. I save articles using the Instapaper bookmarklet. When sharing a particular article or blog post, I’ll use three bookmarklets: +1 (for Google Plus), Flip (for Flipboard), Pin (for Pinterest). I should toss ello onto that list just for kicks.
Those are six ways to use bookmarks in your browser. How do you use bookmarks?
(a hat tip to Chris Thilk for originally asking this question in his blog post Bookmarking is still useful, but differently.)
Although I don’t know if you can really count the bookmarklet as a bookmark. The bookmarklet is more of a script that takes action on the current page; it doesn’t archive the current page. Although, in some ways the bookmarklet can archive/point-to the page–as in the case of Instapaper, Delicious, Google Plus, and Flipboard.