Anouncing import bookmarks for Firefox, Internet Explorer and delicious

Users have been asking to import their existing bookmarks into iterasi since our earliest releases. Well today we are releasing this capability on all platforms we support. Seriously, this feature was requested almost as much as a Mac version. So for me, a personal victory; a bunch less ‘trust me, its coming’ emails I have to write.

This feature imports bookmarks from Firefox, Internet Explorer, del.icio.us and/or from any app that exports to the standard bookmark export format. So you tell it where your bookmarks are, we import them and make permanent copies of the pages the bookmarks point to. No more lost articles. No more link rot. No more Error 404s. But we don’t just import them. Import Bookmarks is built on top of the iterasi Scheduler – released last month – so one-by-one you can choose to archive each bookmark once, every day, week or month, or not a all.

We chose the browser-based bookmarks and del.icio.us (now just ‘delicious’) because they seemed like the obvious first choices. Our plans going forward are to work with other bookmarking services and Web applications to easily automate the permanent capture of Web pages. We see this as a key part of our value proposition; we want to be your personal Web archive, we don’t want to make you change what you do. So we’ll work with the applications that you use every day to make it easy and automatic for you to save what’s important to you.

The Scheduler was released last month. I hope you have had a chance to try it. This handy tool allows you to have iterasi archive pages on regularly scheduled basis (daily, weekly or monthly, you pick the day of the week/month, you pick the time, etc). Like a personal version of archive.org’s WayBackMachine, the iterasi Scheduler can be used to capture your favorite web pages. How can this be used? The Scheduler is useful for daily sites that you don’t want to miss and that change a lot such as retail, news, recipe sites and bloggers/journalists. It is also useful for sites that you want to track over time, like a politician’s site, where you may want to track the number of supporters or their ‘evolving’ messages, or a competitor’s site, where you might want to track announcements, specials and changes in their messaging. The uses for the Scheduler are limited by your imagination.

One warning on import bookmarks: If you have lots of bookmarks, it is best to schedule it to run when you are away from your computer. Think about it; we are feeding dozens and dozens of bookmarks down to the browser who is one-at-a-time loading, notarizing, and shipping each up to your account. In other words, we are torturing the poor browser. As you might expect, the browser can lock up under this kind of load. We find this situation to be unavoidable.

So we decided two things. First, we advise you to import bookmarks when you are away from your computer – say, in the evening. Second, should we be importing a lot of bookmarks and have the browser lock up on us, we would kill and reload it. This way we can run through your entire set of bookmarks and get them archived in (hopefully) a single evening. So the bottom line here is that if you leave something in your browser when you are importing a lot of bookmarks, you may come in the next day and find your browser is closed. We are sorry if this causes any inconvenience but we really have no way around it.

The Import Bookmarks and the Scheduler offer individuals the ability to monitor and archive the Web in ways they’ve never been able to before. Give ‘em a try and let me know what you think at [email protected]

pete