That's it, I didn't think it would happen.  I have a reason to actually use IE at home instead of just at work.  And you know who gave me that reason?  Google.  Kinda ironic considering the hints of accusations being tossed around lately and Google's backing of Firefox.

Why the change of heart?

The much lamented bookmark and Google Toolbar... 

Google's bookmark function has been around for a couple of months.  TechCrunch talked about it here ... and some of the resulting comments were pretty negative.  Rightfully so since it wasn't all that special.  Copied other services and had a funky interface.  But it served a basic purpose.

I was screwing around with my Bookmarks on my Google Personalized Home Page... and noticed for the first time the tagging stuff (I know, slow starter sometimes)... so I played around trying to organize my list.  But I noticed something at the bottom about "Bookmark pages as you surf with Google Toolbar.  Learn More " 

Always wanting to learn more, I clicked and found this page...

Looked promising, so I installed and tried it out.  I like it!

First I went ahead and did some organizing of my book marks... hey, ever seen Google and Del.icio.us side by side?  Try one over one below...

Guess TechCrunch was right about targets...

Anyways, got some organization and now, all of my bookmarks are there waiting for me at any IE computer with the current toolbar installed.

Come on now... make it the same for Firefox so that I can quite IE again. 

Now let's expand some thoughts here...

1.  Google enables easy bookmarking

2.  That bookmarking includes tags / labels

3.  That bookmarking is stored online for your use anywhere

4.  It's actually a pretty good system / service and damn easy to do

5.  Get users to agree to data mining...

Google Goes Social!

or at least incorporates some social ranking into it's search results... my thoughts on that later.