Some Google apps have served their purpose and are being pulled from service. Some are still up, but questionably ill-supported, while others have never promised anything, but are there for the use.
One of those "there for the usage" apps is Google Bookmarks.
It's just there. It's useful if you want to quick-mark a website to go back to later, but as time goes on, your collective of bookmarks grows at a crazy rate.
But there's no decent way to filter and prune the list of links. If you want to start deleting them, you have a few base options and most of them are tedious and slow:
Delete All
Or
Delete one at a time, paging through and selecting each one on each page.
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There are plusses and minuses to both processes.
DELETE ALL
Deleting everything is quick and painless. But are you sure that's what you want to do? Were there links in there that maybe, you wanted to keep?
My take is that if you bookmarked something and never went back, then it's probably a moot thing and deleting all isn't a bad thing.
And by what I mean by "never went back," is that if it's over a few weeks old, then you've probably moved on from whatever reason you had to stash it.
Smiting them all is a fresh start.
I've smite all my bookmarks a few times and I don't think I've missed anything.
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DELETE ONE AT A TIME
What a pain in the ass... paging through each section, and singularly deleting each bookmark.
You could sort your bookmarks by title, label or date... but you're still relegated to individual deletes.
That's my snag... you can't select a bunch at once. It is only one at a time. I'd love to have a some small feature that lets you select more than one at a time!
But therein lies an interesting idea, via the sorting options.
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DELETE BY LABEL
Over time, what I've done is label the important links I've saved because I do go back. But then there you go, left with several hundred (or in one case, I had thousands) of unlabeled bookmarks.
That's when it hit me that maybe, no matter what, I should at least label each bookmarked link with a month name!
Then, when I want to clean out the place, I can pull up an entire month's worth of saved links for deletion.
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THEN THERE'S PLAN B
You always have to have a plan B.
Google gives you an option to export your bookmarks (though they give you ZERO option to import the same file back) which has its upside. Personally, I'd love to export, edit that html file, and then import it again. That would be awesome, but alas, that feature does not exist.
But it's not about the finesse of what we want or need. Google Bookmarks is a basic service provided.
When you export your bookmarks, you can either open in a browser window or save them as an html file.
Either way, you could save the html file, then delete all your bookmarks, but at least you have them all in that html file. (I'd tack a month.year to the end of the html file name saved, just in case)
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That's that.
Google has created a ton of tools for folks. All useful tools, but sometimes, rather light in the utility use of it. But the tools are to serve a purpose. Google's purpose, not our own. Sometimes they add usefulness to the functions and other times, they let it slide.
And then at the oddest times, they kill a service, like the RSS Feed reader they smite a few months ago. I'm guessing it's purpose had come and gone, and consumers scrambled to find replacements after that.
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ALWAYS HAVE A PLAN B of APPS
But what I take away from all of it is if you like what Google provides, that's awesome. They do create (or buy) great apps. But always be sure to have a plan B in place. Just in case they terminate a tool, utility or an account of yours.
You just never know when it might be handy to have a back-up plan.
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