Google has been working on building Google Stars – a centralized and a broader bookmarking service. Aptly named Stars, the service will help you save your favorite web pages.
Not just that there’s much more, which is why I call it a broader bookmarking service. Stars will help you save and organize your bookmarks in a neat manner and you can have them displayed with thumbnails – your bookmarks will be beautiful.
Google has been testing this service and a Google+ user named Florian Kiersch has had the opportunity to try out the service. He has posted a video of the service as he tried it out.
Stars is more than just a bookmarking service. You could have all your favorite web pages, emails, maps, images, videos, Google+ pages and much more and save them to your account.
You can create folders to keep your bookmarks organized. You can name your folders and also add an appropriate description to each folder. And you can search through your bookmarks as well (this is not surprising as the service comes from the search giant Google).
Florian has posted a screencast video recorded while he uses (tests) Google Stars and the video runs through some of the basic features of the service.
You can have your bookmarks private for privacy reasons or you could make them public. You can also share a specific bookmark or an entire folder with someone.
There are quite some automatic features built inside the service. Built in spam detection is one such feature where spam and dead pages will be automatically detected and will be archived so your bookmarks will be clean.
Inside the folder view, your bookmarks will be shown as thumbnails with the option to add notes. This makes it interactive, which I personally like very much.
If you are gathering information on a particular topic or if you are looking to find a product you can easily organize those bookmarks in a folder and also add notes appropriately so you can come back to it at a later time and still know what it was all about!
Google Stars will probably be launched initially as a browser based service, say as a Chrome extension or something like that. But we could also expect Google to make apps for iOS and Android.
Oh and from the screenshots it is evident that Google Stars will be a cloud based service which makes it centralized!
OK, does Google Stars sound interesting to you? To me personally, yes it sounds very interesting and I am waiting to use it. The service is expected to be launched in June.