WebCull

Bookmark Manager Sync

Improved bookmark accessibility

Since the conception of our prototype, we aspired to make something that improved the accessibility of web bookmarks. We half-way accomplished this by creating a responsive web-app that can be loaded from pretty much any browser or device. The only missing ingredient was automatic synchronization of your data so that you don't need to reload the page if ever you made changes from another tab, browser or device.

Browser bookmarks have this but there's a catch.

Browsers like Chrome and Firefox also have something they call Sync but it only works from the same browser you have your bookmarks on. Want to use a different browser on a device? Well no bookmarks then, and not only that, but you also need to log into something that might be a lot more than you want or need. For example, it could be opening up access to your emails, browser history, passwords, docs, etc... All just to open a link that you have bookmarked? We think that's unnecessary and potentially unsecure.

Here's another big problem.

It appears keeping things in sync is a pretty hard engineering challenge. There is an almost endless stream of social media posts out there where people are complaining that bookmarks go missing or are moved incorrectly. The problem is that if something is incorrectly synced stuff can just disappear or appear seemingly without explanation. This is not because it's impossible to create a sync feature that works correctly, it just needs to be built with the right kind of sync functionality for the right kind of challenge.

There are different levels of this type of challenge, for example in gaming, players are all experiencing the world in-sync except the exact order of things in this scenario may not be absolutely critical, so a loose form of sync can be applied where things are happening roughly in order. That kind of sync is a lot easier to make and can be a bit quicker but for example with things like messaging apps the order of things is very important.

You wouldn't want to be having a conversation with someone where the order of the messages being sent and received is not the exact same on both screens. The same thing goes for bookmark tools, you wouldn't want to place a bookmark somewhere from your computer, only to open it on your phone and not be able to find the bookmark where you left it because the order was not perfectly in sync.

Our approach to this challenge.

We make sure to implement a strict sync algorithm that ensures the order of the sequences remain correct and also self verifies that things are correct after every action. We take Sync functionality very seriously and have rigorously tested it to ensure that it's working accurately. This feature makes your experience using WebCull with multiple devices or browsers/tabs a lot more simple by making it so you never need to hit the refresh button again.

Hit us up on Twitter to let us know what you think.
https://twitter.com/WebCull


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