Access Your PC's Favorites From Your Phone

For those of us with multiple computers and devices, and even with multiple browsers on those devices, keeping all of our shortcuts (or favorites or bookmarks) accessible no matter which computer we are using can be quite a chore. Foxmarks has a product that will help you out, and best of all, it is free.Foxmarks is a little program that monitors the folder on your PC that stores your Internet favorites and synchronizes them with a password protected account on their server. It tracks additions, deletions, renaming and even the order you have them in. Then, for every other browser you have, whether it is on the same or a different computer, it replicates those changes to that browser's profile, and any changes detected there are sent back to the server to go be sync'd with your other browsers. My favorite feature is it keeps the Links bar up to date, and in the same order for Firefox and Internet Explorer. Let's say you use Windows XP and Internet Explorer at work, an Apple iMac for the family computer and a Windows based netbook with Firefox that you carry around. Once you install Foxmarks for each browser for all of your machines, once it detects a network connection, it begins the synchronization. Right now, it supports Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Firefox 2 and 3 on Windows XP and Vista. Safari and Firefox are supported on the Apple. I am sure they are working on supporting Microsoft's forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser. There are a number of requests on their site to support Safari on Windows, but there is no indication that they are working on that. It doesn't support synchronization with any mobile phone yet like an iPhone or a Windows Mobile device, but because your favorites are on their site, you can simply launch your browser on the phone, log in to your account and access your favorites that way. I wouldn't recommend this as your only way to access favorites on your phone, but it is great in a pinch when you need it. They have a mobile friendly site for this at my.foxmarks.com/mobile. For that matter, you could do the same thing at any PC where you want temporary access to your favorites but don't want to store them locally on that machine. Simply log in at my.foxmarks.com. I'd really like to see the ability to actually sync favorites to your phone, or at least a subset of them. After all, Windows Mobile devices and the iPhone are really just small computers. Even without this feature though, Foxmarks is a nice little app that helps you keep all of your favorites, no matter where they are, up to date and accessible.