Phantom Maelstrom

The Google version of Delicious, Google Bookmarks, will soon close its "lists feature" according to Google Inc.

Google Bookmarks is a free online bookmark storage service, available to Google Account holder. It was launched on October 10, 2005. Google Bookmarks allows users to bookmark faborite websites and add labels or tags, including notes.

Like Delicious (which is owned by AVOS), Google Bookmarks uses lists to share bookmarks with others, and the public. Many websites will encourage bookmarking to Google Bookmarks through third party buttons on their sites, knowing that Google's search engine tracks these bookmarks and considers them significant when ranking public search results.

What is Lists?

Lists is an English-only experimental feature incorporated into Google Bookmarks for sharing bookmarks and collaborating with friends.

When Facebook boomed, Google discovered that fewer and fewer people were using this feature. With people most likely sharing their links via Facebook instead.

According to Google, Lists will be totally discontinued on December 19th, 2011.

Why is Lists being discontinued?

According to Google, they are focusing their efforts on the prioritization of other products so they can make things much simpler for their users and devote more resources to high-impact products.

On this statement, Google admits that their Google Bookmarks "Lists" feature had become less significant to most users.

When is Lists being discontinued?

Lists, according to Google, will become read-only on December 12th and will be entirely discontinued on December 19th, 2011. During the read-only period, users will be able to change the public/private status of lists they own, but they won't be able to create new lists or edit existing ones.

Once the feature is discontinued, the Lists that users own (all items) will be saved as bookmarks with the label "MyBookmarkList." Comments will be saved along with each bookmark. However, all other lists (including those shared with the users) can no longer be access. Google advises that if you want to save items from these lists, you should bookmark them before December 19th, 2011.