Experts who look closely at both services notice at least one feature that is supported by Last Pass and Xmarks: Password synchronization. Both Last Pass and Xmarks can synchronize passwords, and it seems that the new owners have made the decision to remove the password sync feature from Xmarks.

The Foxmarks Wiki reads:

The Xmarks Password Sync feature will be removed January 30, 2011. We are strongly encouraging all users migrate to LastPass for this feature!

While this has to be taken with a grain of salt, as everyone can add and edit pages, it would make sense from a business point of view. the benefits should be clear:

• The majority of users who are using password sync in Xmarks will likely migrate to Last Pass.
• The developers do not have to support and develop the same feature in two different applications.

Another indication that password sync will be removed from Xmarks is an entry in the changelog which reads: “LastPass’ password sync is now preferred”.

Password Sync is working fine in Xmarks as of now, even though there was a problem with the recent Chrome extension which the developers fixed soon thereafter.

What should users do who use Xmarks to sync their passwords? They should wait for an official confirmation first before they do anything.

The wiki entry suggests to install LastPass for Firefox and import the data from Firefox. This way all Xmark’s passwords are automatically imported into the Last Pass password manager. Xmarks obviously needs to be installed as well. (via)

A new post on the Xmarks blog has now revealed that LastPass was the company that bought the popular bookmarking service which was said to shutdown in January 2011. The good news is that Xmarks has been saved and that everything that is remains the same.

Xmarks Premium has been introduced and it appears to use a business model very similar to the one that LastPass uses successfully. Xmarks Premium users get additional features like Android and iPhone apps, priority support and more for $12 a year. Or, they can pay $20 if they are LastPass users as well to get both premium services for a discount.

Good news for Opera users as XMarks has listed integration with the popular web browser on of their priorities in their roadmap. So, development continues and it is possible that the two services get integrated into one eventually. (via Xmarks, LastPass).

All in all an excellent acquisition that – for once – does not change a thing for current users of the service.

Todd Agulnick, Co-Founder and CTO, mentioned that the company was unable to find a suitable business model for their service, and that potential deals with other companies that were interested in buying Xmarks fell through as well. With no revenue streams on the one side, and maintenance (hosting, staff) costs on the other, it was bound to get ugly at one point. The developers hoped that they would either find a revenue model or a company eventually, but since that did not happen they had to pull the plug.

Xmarks users can use the service as usual until January 10, 2011. At this point, the service will no function as the servers are taken down. Xmarks offers information on their shutdown page, and a blog post by Todd. Sad to see such a popular service with millions of users and more than 1.2 billion bookmarks synchronized go away.

In other news, OpenOffice developers have staged a revolt, more or less by declaring their independence from Oracle, and any other single company for that matter. That’s likely a direct response to Oracle’s neglect of the popular Open Source project. As you may recall, when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems earlier this year they basically inherited the ties with Open Office as well.

The Document Foundation:

• It is an independent self-governing meritocratic Foundation, created by leading members of the OpenOffice.org Community.
• It continues to build on the foundation of ten years’ dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community.
• It was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent Foundation brings out the best in contributors and will deliver the best software for users.
• It is open to any individual who agrees with our core values and contributes to our activities.
• It welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community.

libreoffice

The OpenOffice project is now officially named The Document Foundation, and OpenOffice has been temporarily renamed to LibreOffice. Temporarily? The rights to the name belong to Oracle, and while the developers have cut their ties with the company, they have invited it to apply to The Foundation and donate the brand to the community.

For now, OpenOffice is called LibreOffice.

Xmarks, a company that is offering plugins to sync bookmarks between installations of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari, have now announced that a limited beta release for the Google browser is available on their website. Limited beta in this case means that users with an Xmarks account can join the waiting list of the Google Chrome Xmarks beta plugin. They will be notified once they are able to download the plugin for the Google Chrome web browser.

The developers mention scaling and stability reasons for limiting the beta downloads in this stage. Google Chrome users who are interested in the plugin should sign up for the alpha on the Xmarks website. They also need to ensure that they are running a development build of the Google browser with extensions enabled. Several features of the bookmark syncing plugin are currently not included in the Google Chrome version of the plugin including missing support for custom bookmark servers, syncing profiles and the discovery feature.

Xmarks for Chrome is the first Google Chrome plugin that syncs bookmarks between different web browsers.