Profile: Furl
Michael Arrington
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Company: Furl
Status: Founded in the spring of 2003 by Mike Giles. Acquired by Looksmart on September 23, 2004
Origin of the Name: “The origin of the name came from the very geeky description of what the system does - File URLs. If you can enter a URL and see it in your browser, we can save it for you. Once the name started being used and it was time to find a replacement, we just couldn’t come up with one we liked more. It’s short, simple and pretty easy to remember. And as an added bonus, the definition of “furl” is “to roll up and secure,” which is exactly what we do with all the interesting Web pages you find online.” Link
What is it?
Furl is a social bookmarking site often compared to Deli.cio.us (TechCrunch review of delicious here). However, there are some key differences and many people use both obsessively.
At its core, once you’ve signed up with furl, if you find a site/post that you want to retain, you can “furl” it and it is saved for you. You can find the site/post later by searching for tags that you’ve associated with it (or other meta data), or by a text search.
If you understand delicious but are unfamiliar with Furl, the best way to describe Furl is a more structured delicious. There are much deeper meta data options when bookmarking a page, for instance. With delicious, currently, you can only tag a page and annotate it with notes. With Furl, you can tag it, categorize it with pre-populated items, rate it and add notes. Many Furl users like these options when tagging pages. Some users don’t need the extra data, and don’t like the time it takes to fill it out. To see this visually, here is a screen shot of a furl bookmark:
Furl also does other things differently than delicious. The site you’ve bookmarked is saved at Furl (each member gets 5 gigs of storage), which means you can keep data even if the page changes. And, this allows for super-fast text searches on pages you’ve bookmarked, something delicious can’t offer. John Battelle puts it this way:
“So what is it about Furl that made me write that past paragraph? After all, it’s just a web page-saving application. Right? Well, yes and no. Furl does a good job of helping you manage your web browsing. It adds several features that others don’ t have - full text search on your saved pages, for example. But Furl saves the entire web page you’ve “furled”, not just the URL, which prevents link rot, on the one hand, and creates what I’ll call a “PersonalWeb,” on the other.” Link
Viewing all of your furl links is much like delicious. You can either view them by signing into the site, or you (and everyone else) can view the links by going to the user-specific URL. For instance, all sites bookmarked with Furl by techcrunch can be viewed at furl.net/members/techcrunch. These pages are available by RSS as well.
Replace “techcrunch” with any other user name in the link above, and you can see their bookmarks, too. Furl also has a private option, however, and those links will not be viewable to anyone except you.
There are also other nice Furl options, like adding friends who can be notified of your new postings, and the Furl search engine is fantastic, almost as an afterthought. Another feature - if you view a furl’d URL, you can see other URLs that user’s Furl’d as well - a great way to find related content (see last screen shot below)
Overall, Furl is excellent and highly recommended.
Key Features:
- easy bookmarking of sites
- retains cached copy of site
- tag and full text search
- easy sharing of bookmarks
- great tools (Link)
- great search engine
- great recommendation engine based on your furls - see last screen shot below)
- passionate users (see relevant links below)
Additional Screen Shots:
Relevant Links:
About
Faq
Contentious on Furl
Furl Tutorial
Roxomatic
Contentious - 10 cool things to do with furl
Battelle on furl
Passingnotes on furl
Scip on furl
P.S. on not using Furl
D-Lib Magazine on Social Bookmarking Sites
Technorati tag: furl
delicious tag: furl
Furl Search: Furl
ThinkLemon
Tags: furl, bookmarking, web2.0, techcrunch, socialbookmarking, looksmart
roxomatic - Social bookmarks review
Marshall’s Web Tool Blog (discussion of Furl “tagging”)
I am totally in love with Furl, and one of the best features was not mentioned above. That’s the recomendations feature. Once you’ve got your archive well populated Furl will compare it with the archives of others and list web sites that have been furled by people whose archives are similar to your own. It also recomends users whose archives you might appreciate. I’ve gone through those users recomended to me, subscribed to 10 or so of them by RSS and now recieve their archived sites each day. These are people who have interests very similar to me own, and as a result they are very valuable content streams for me to read. I know delicious can be used in the same way, but it’s far less automated.
Also, any text you have highlighted when you click your Furl button, is automatically in the “clippings” field of the Furl It pop-up. That’s nice.
Unfortunately, Furl isn’t perfect. The service has been unavailable probably 3 times in the last 9 months, though usually only for a few hours. I refuse to read the web without though, so this is a bummer. Also, in my consulting work I try to get social justice minded groups and small businesses to adopt web 2.0 apps, and old software cannot always handle furl. For example, I had someone very excited about using Furl and Newsgator together last week, but am now told by Furl that the combination of Mac OS 9 and IE isn’t supported by Furl. I know that this is a common dilema with web 2.0 adoption, but I am looking for a similar service that saves full text copies of pages with a single click that said client can use.
Nonetheless, I love Furl!
I’ve used Furl It and Del.iceo.us but they still don’t meet the need to share web useful pages in a really user friendly way.I admit listing bookmarks in categories is useful, but I would like more visual structure. Jumping back and forward between bookmarks is a real pain.
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I agree, what a great blog. As for furl, I’ve gone through those users recomended to me, subscribed to 10 or so of them by RSS and now recieve their archived sites each day. These are people who have interests very similar to me own, and as a result they are very valuable content streams for me to read.
Join the new Google Group for furl users:
http://groups.google.com/group/furl-users