For quite a few years now I’ve happily used Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) as my de-facto bookmarks synchroniser. However, they’ve now announced that within the next 90 days, Xmarks will be closing down.

It’s mentioned on their blog, but not their site front page (and I probably wouldn’t have realised if I hadn’t seen the news elsewhere). It would appear that their inability to “moneterise” Xmarks has been the problem. They had made steps recently to move Xmarks towards a newer audience, with the display of site ratings both in search results and in the browser toolbar. However, they’ve done this whilst not keeping up-to-date with the sync applications available elsewhere – they’ve recently added tab syncing, but they still lag behind the sync features of many of their competition.

Many of those commenting on the blog have suggested that they try charging $10 a year for the service – many are saying they would and it does seem strange that Xmarks hasn’t tried a subscription service before giving up.

For us end users, it leaves us wondering where to go now. Personally, I’ve now installed Firefox Sync, which is from Mozilla. This will be included by default in the next major Firefox release – it doesn’t have the bells and whistles which I never used, but does synchronise, well, pretty much everything.