Mobile Bookmark Manager

John at mypalmlife is looking for a Palm application that will synchronize with his desktop bookmarks and import them into the Web Pro web browser. I've also been looking for the same solution. John points to three different solutions, some of which might be good starting points. (I tried FavoGo, but the conduit threw an exception on the first try.)

I had the concept for a “Mobile Bookmark Manager” that would provide much of this functionality:

  • Synchronize bookmarks between desktop web browsers (IE, Mozilla, etc.) and device, being able to sync your whole collection or perhaps just one sub-folder
  • On the device, ability to beam/send bookmarks for sharing
  • On the device, ability to add new bookmarks which will be synced back to the desktop
  • For newly-discovered bookmarks, create a “read later” method that would be presented back on the desktop (“while you were away, here are some new pages you wanted to read…”)

You could also use this to synchronize bookmarks between multiple computers, but I suspect that a server-based solution would work better. For one thing, people don't usually sync to ALL of their computers.

One current obstacle is lack of an “official” interface to the device web browsers' bookmarks databases (e.g., palmOne's Web Pro). I've looked at the database and it's not too complicated, so one could always reverse engineer the format and pay close attention to updates in the future in case it changes. One approach would be simply a conduit that synced between the desktop favorites and the Web Pro bookmarks database, saving the need for a device application.