The recently released Windows Live Toolbar includes a new Windows Live Favorites syncing feature The toolbar pic shown above is from their site, but for some odd reason they aren't showing the Favorites button (but you can see it here) - or even listing it as a feature. That's just stupid.
Anyway, from what I can tell it syncs up your favorites to a central server... and then later when you move to another machine it syncs up to that one. I played with this feature at work on IE6 - and at first I hated it because I was looking for a drop down with my bookmarks... and the Live Toolbar only gives you the option to sync - it doesn't actually show you your favorites. Seemed like a waste (and counter-intuitive to my IE Google Toolbar beta with Bookmarks experience), until today while on one of my laptops with IE7b2 I noticed the favorites button to the left of the tabs. I get it now... keep your favorites where IE always had them... just sync them to a server! Cool.
While waiting on Microsoft I started using the new IE Google Toolbar (the Firefox one doesn't have the bookmarks feature yet). It has this perfect little bookmarks drop down that saves bookmarks to a server - with the typical Google tag-style method like Gmail vs. the more common folder/sub-folder structure in IE.
Anyway, that's why I didn't get the Windows Live Favorites at first. Unfortunately IE7b2 crashed on me once a day so I had to give it up... but hey, IE7, the nifty favorites button and the Live Toolbar are going to work great together - that is if the IE team doesn't force the toolbar to load a new copy into memory for EACH tab - like they force the Google Toolbar to do. Sigh....
posted @ Tuesday, August 08, 2006 7:44 PM