DEMO: Xmarks reveals bookmarking trends among web browsers

Foxmarks has built a big following as an add-on application for the Firefox browser. It synchronizes bookmarks between a user’s different computers and has been downloaded more than 14 million times.

Now the San Francisco company, which has changed its name to Xmarks, is sharing what it has learned from all of those 600 million stored bookmark records. The company is launching a service for consumers today at DEMO 2009 which enhances consumers’ search results with bookmarking information.

That is, when you do a browser search, Xmarks will tell you which of the search results have been bookmarked by the most people. It highlights just the top three results, but that’s usually enough to tell you which results are going to be the most interesting to you. Moreover, you can look up information about any web site by simply clicking on the “get site info” button.

Xmarks sends you to a summary page that tells you what the web site is about, how many people have bookmarked it, what sorts of reviews are written about it, and the names of some similar web sites. The latter takes advantage of the stored bookmarks to leverage the research of people who have looked at the same thing before you. The company says this allows it to produce more relevant results.

Xmarks also has another service included in the download of its plug-in that allows you to synchronize passwords across machines. The company was founded in 2006 and has taken funding from serial entrepreneur Mitch Kapor and Redpoint Ventures. Xmarks has 16 employees.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693

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