Rationale

In short, I want my bookmarking service:

• To be very quick to use;
• To provide a way to organize my bookmarks in a powerful way.

I tried a lot of existing bookmarking services, and I wasn't satisfied by any of them, for a variety of reasons.

Let me elaborate on the organization part first. The simplest way to organize bookmarks is to introduce folders to group them. This still poses a well-known problem though: some bookmarks can logically belong to multiple folders. In order to address this issue, some services use tags: now we can tag a bookmark with more than one tag. So far so good.

Now, assume I have a generic tag programming, and a couple of more specific tags: python and c. I definitely want my bookmarking service to be smart enough to figure that if I tag some article with either python or c, it means programming as well; I don't want to add the tag programming manually every single time. So, what we need is a hierarchy of tags. Surprisingly enough, I failed to find a service which would support that.

This hierarchical tags thing was a major motivation for me to start Geekmarks.

Another important thing is that I want bookmarking service to be very quick to use. I don't want to go through these heavy user interfaces and look at all the eye candy. In my daily life I just want to either add a bookmark or find one, and I want to do that quickly: like, just a few keystrokes, and I'm done.

So, meet Geekmarks! A free, open-source, API-driven bookmarking service.