Windows Live Favorites: Have you heard of it?

A while back, I was trying to find an online service where I could save my favorites (or bookmarks). I could not find any one convincing enough.

A few days ago, I decided to re-image my laptop as I had a lot of stuff accumulated over a period of time. It was causing performance issues with my laptop. As a part of this, I re-installed most of my favorite applications/tools. I use Live toolbar for the Windows Live Writer button it has. I just can't live without Windows Live Writer as I wrote earlier here, and here.

This time when I installed the Live toolbar I noticed a new button - 'Favorites'  . This is another very useful tool for the Live stable. I guess it must have been around for a while but missed my attention. I am almost beginning to like the live toolbar after this. There are still a few buttons I need to get rid of but overall, I am impressed.

Windows Live Favorites allows you sync your favorites from IE and bookmarks from Firefox using the bookmarks.html file. Favorites has a very elementary UI (and I love that about it). It has a nice set of useful features, it allows you to:

• organize your favorites in Folders (very much like IE)
• add optional tagging for more organization
• share your bookmarks, or keep them private
• keep favorites in sync with IE (see image below)
• resolve any conflicts with the local machines

Thanks to this awesome toolette (I just coined another word for the dictionary), I don't need to backup my favorites the next time I re-image my laptop.