XMarks May Live On

Late September, we wrote a post about the possible demise of XMarks, a browser plugin that syncs bookmarks, password, tabs, etc.. At that time XMarks announced that they are shutting down because they couldn’t find a sustainable business model to keep running the operations. This announcement brought them tremendous amount of support from the users with many of them making a voluntary pledge to pay for the service.

Today XMarks has written a blog post saying that they are in the process of selling their service to someone and the service will live on by offering some premium features along with the free features.

The Xmarks service will evolve to have both a free component and a premium component – we’ll share all the details once the deal is done. For all of you that signed our pledge, or are asking us to reopen the pledge, please hold that thought. When we update the service we’ll have a premium option for you to spend some of your hard earned money on, and we will be very thankful when you do!

When they announced the shutting down of their service, I asked a question about the viability of running a sustainable business on top of a browser extension.

What do you think? Is it sustainable? I want to hear from you because I am using a Chrome extension for the past few days which is very handy for me. It is called CloudMagic and I really want to see if these guys could convert their nifty browser extension into a scalable business.

Now that they have officially announced that there are plans to build a business around XMarks, I would love to watch them evolve. It will be interesting to see if they can manage to build a sustainable business on top of the browser extension and the associated sync service alone (which has the potential to become completely irrelevant as the developers build such features into the browser itself) or they will evolve into a service beyond the browser syncing. What do you think?