According to a company blog post, social bookmarking and search tool Xmarks is shutting down in 90 days.
Following a rebranding from Foxmarks last year, Xmarks, a social bookmarking and search tool, had been growing steadily in users. After the addition of its search feature last March, Xmarks now had 2 million active users and had bookmarked 1 billion URLS. Xmarks is free as a plug-in to users (and was available on IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari).
In the blog post written by Xmarks co-founder and CTO Todd Agulnick (other co-founder is Mitch Kapor), the startup simply didn’t have enough users and couldn’t monetize the service. In the Spring of this year, the startup started looking for potential buyers of the company with funds running low. The company tried turning on revenue channels earlier this year for its sync features, but these features are already included for free in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
Xmarks CEO James Joaquin tells me “We made an impressive attempt to monetize our 1 billion bookmark corpus with several innovative search products, but ultimately we didn’t find a scalable business model. With Firefox and Google building sync into the browser, it’s the end of the road for Xmarks.”
We’ve added the startup to the deadpool.
This company was founded in 2006 as Foxmarks, offering a popular free bookmark synchronization add-on for the Firefox Web browser. In February 2009 the company release versions of their bookmark sync product for Internet Explorer and Safari (Mac only). In March 2009, the company announced their new name Xmarks and their new web discovery service. Xmarks.com shows site information for a broad range of URLs and, for each site, generates a list of topics and similar sites based on millions of...
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