Google Star – Bookmarking Revisited in a New Avatar
All web browsers come almost always come equipped with bookmarks that allow you to save links that you would like to later revisit. At one point of time people did actually bookmark sites and pages that they found interesting and wanted to keep for future reference. Those were the days when search engines were not really prevalent and people had to trawl through tonnes of data to get the desired information. Bookmarks allowed them to store the link for easy reference as and when required. But it did just that, it allowed users to bookmark the links they wanted to revisit at a later date. The emergence of search engines corresponded with the decline in bookmark usage as all information became readily available at the click of a button. Moreover data stored today might become obsolete tomorrow and hence bookmarking became obsolete so to say. Not really, it appears as per Google, which has been testing a new feature called Star that aims to make bookmarking a comprehensive feature allowing users to organize all their data, both on the net and on their devices into searchable folders. Google is testing Stars; an idea to save bookmarks from becoming extinct. It is supposed to have features much more advanced than bookmarks. You can create folders of your bookmarks, which will then be shown in a network of thumbnails. "More beautiful than bookmarks," the source code says, with Google Stars you will be allowed to add notes to your bookmarks. This feature might prove useful as we tend to forget why we actually bookmarked it. All your bookmarks will be searchable. And spammed pages will automatically be detected and removed. Your bookmarks will by default be private but it will be possible to make a folder labeled public to share them. You could ‘star’ webpages and emails. As also Youtube videos or even personal contacts. Google Stars was recently leaked by German student and Google+ expert Florian Kiersch. According to Kiersch, “Google Star is a
beautiful mix of the best of Pinterest, Dropbox, and Del.icio.us, displayed in an image-rich grid.”Google has already provided the ability to add stars to existing services like GoogleMap, Google Drive and Gmail, the same will now get extended to videos, websites and images as well with the result that all data will now be organized and easily available under one Google Star umbrella. Kiersch firmly believes that the Star feature is likely to be launched by Google at the I/O developer conference in June.
Google Stars Branding
Google Stars was originally called Google Collections, Kiersch writes. "Thank you for dogfooding Google Stars!" reads one output in the code, suggesting that Google employees are testing the feature now. "We are working hard to make Google Stars a product you love."
A cloud-based service, it is likely to be available on chrome first, before expanding to other properties.
