Xmarks and Web Application Funding

The nature of what I do (for work and home) involves some Web development, using multiple browsers (FireFox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc.) on multiple platforms, workstations and PCs, and the best tool I've found so far to manage all the Bookmarks links is Xmarks.  

http://www.xmarks.com

While the Google toolbar isn't bad, and the built in synchronizations in Firefox and Chrome are OK, I've found that the platforms and synchronization capabilities in Xmarks to be a lot better.  The cross browser synchronization is where it particularly stands out from the pack.  Update in one browser on one PC, and poof, the bookmarks are updated in other browsers on the same or other PCs (or Macs), all without giving up any toolbar (screen space) to speak of.

And it is Free!  Or at least has been.  You cannot really beat free as a consumer.  Oh, I'd pay for it, took the pledge actually, but that brings me to the funding model problem on Web Applications.  In a traditional Application environment, you buy the computer, you buy the software to get it running, you buy Applications on top to do what you need to do.  The hardware and so forth frequently will need updating, so there's an ongoing maintenance cost, but mostly it stays running.  Web Applications offer the advantage of doing a lot of that for you.  Somebody else worries the details, costs are optimized and spread out against a bigger community.  I wouldn't use Web applications for something really secure or high performance (though the Cloud stuff by IBM, Google, Amazon, etc. seems off trying to solve some of that) or where I was basically paying for a server or server farm, but for small, non-critcal types of things, the Web Application (and eventually Cloud) model should work very well.  It's clearly the future.

But then, and this is the nasty bit, what to do when a Web application you use and love potentially goes away.  They have to reach a critical mass, they have to find an ongoing business or funding model.  And that's where Xmarks is apparently struggling.  It's a great, really industry-best application, gives you some (browser) vendor independence, oil-in-the-engine type of thing for the Web, but it is tough to figure out how to pay for it and make some money.  So a start-up on Xmarks must make a transition, become self-sustaining, or get bought by another outfit which makes them part of a bigger whole.  Hopefully, someone with deeper pockets will buy Xmarks, the most likely candidates would probably be ironically be Google or Yahoo (the crosss browser capabilities being of most interest there, despite Chorme (which is a browser I love, but not very big yet in marketshare)), or even Mozilla (but they don't have deep pockets), or perhaps IBM or Oracle (which do).  There's an actual huge intrinsic value in the data in Bookmark farms.  Hopefully that will happen, it should, there's a bigger picture aspect to all of this.  However, for Web application users in general?  That's the tough one.