Social bookmarking and annotation service provider Diigo has acquired web page clipping and archiving service Furl from publicly listed search advertising network company LookSmart in exchange for equity. The deal is being pitched as a partnership but looks more like a smart decision from LookSmart to offload a property that had little to do with its core business and Diigo jumping on a relevant opportunity without having to spend any cash.
Either way, Diigo has now bought a service that in many ways can be compared to its own product. Both offer a way for website visitors to save entire web pages or just parts as well as annotate and share with others what they consider interesting on the web. Diigo doesn’t refer to its service as social bookmarking but rather as a research and knowledge-sharing tool, but in reality it isn’t all that different from Delicious and the likes, including Furl. You might as well say Diigo bought a rival as it is readying the launch of the upcoming Diigo 4.0 platform, which is said to be taking social bookmarking and annotation ‘to new heights’.
Furl, besides being one of the very first web services profiled by Mike Arrington when he started TechCrunch, was acquired by LookSmart back in September 2004. Although it was one of the first startups to focus on leveraging new technologies to add a social layer to site bookmarking, it never really quite took off the way Delicious did and according to the press release attracted only 1 million users for its service since its inception 6 years ago.
2 great services, we’ll see how it will work out.
U r right. Acquisition is smart. Lets see what they will do…
Wow. ‘Diigo’ ; The name looks similar to Digg.
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
Brilliant observation!
hm… but they’re totally different
digg is submiting and voting for news and diigo is a very advanced and cool bookmark service, totally innovating
With the ability to highlight and sticky note any web page, Diigo really is quite a bit more than what delicious offers
Good announce
sounds like a corpse buys a dead body…
You’re hilarious!
Lets just hope they’ll make it even better.
Robin,
Thanks for the coverage. We would like to warmly welcome all Furl users to the Diigo community!
Indeed, Diigo’s next major release is forthcoming. Stay tuned, as Diigo continues to innovate and evolve!
I’ll take a million users any day…
del.ico.us – is primitive – that’s the ice age where i was at b4. Now I twitter anotated pages from Diigo, send Diigo annotated short-urls to non-diigo poeple.
It builds community discovery! so much to offer! – love it. Once you try Diigo – you don’t want to go back to del.ico.us – and anyway diigo can still feed your del.ico.us! -I’m a convert and raving fan!
The only advantage i see of del.ico.us are all the addons that have been developed, but franky, not even those persuade me to engage with it!
move over del.ico.us – diigo has got the power!
Diigo has power all right : but I’ve found using a variety of tools a better guarantee of not being sandbagged by companies going under, applications being dropped, and buyouts changing things around – though the last seems to have been more to the good than not.
Del.icio.us installs in Pageflakes, Netvibes or Google Reader and can be used directly in Firefox, instead of Foxmarks.
Yahoo Bookmarks are easy to pop onto the toolbar also – and Opera has Bookmarking available.
The family seems to have gone to Facebook with me the lone holdout. Twitter hasn’t been convenient for me because I don’t have regular cellphone or PDA availability. Instead I have been making the rounds of social sites like Care2 and Current for doses of neighbourhood input.
Bloglinesand Livejournal are in my repetoire too – but don’t have current novelty value.
I agree that diigo really understands the needs of social bookmarking for distributed projects in a way delicious doesn’t. it’s a very good tool.
Tony
BTW I use Diigo and Del.icio.us in tandem.
Furl has been DEAD for a while and LookSmart has been looking to sell it (give it away?) for a while. Look at how little love LS has been giving Furl:
http://www.grab...7&hours=240
http://www.grab...7&hours=240
Now they will suck together.
I’m very glad to hear that Diigo 4.0 is in the works and aims to raise the bar. They’ve been outstanding about listening to users and I’m curious to see how many of the features that we’ve all requested/suggested and our feedback about the interface, etc. will be addressed in the new version.
I’ve been using Furl for about a year. The main advantage over Delicous is the fact that it saves a cache of the webpage. I can’t tell you how enormously useful this is when working on research projects. It’s one of the few sites that does this well. (Webcitation.org is good but has no means of managing the cached webpages).
@Tony Diigo does the same thing (that’s one of the reasons I switched to it from Del.icio.us)
…and FURL was profiled one entire year earlier (april 04) by yours truly, when i tracked down mike giles, and also talked to hjalli at spurl shortly after this…
no, arrington is not early, he’s often behind the 8 ball on new technology…
To me, Diigo is like Wordpress in that both are really smart pieces of software and they update and add features quicker than I can think to want them. This is mark of a good team – some software never gets its act together. Now it’s good to see that Diigo is also growing with the acquisition of Furl because providing good software doesn’t seem to be all it takes to be successful. Give Diigo a try if you haven’t already – and if you have and want some new feature, let them know.
A few months ago nytimes.com migrated its own bookmarking feature over to furl — presumably that pimped it out enuf for diigo to bite…
…at first glance it looks like a delicious.com styled dish trying to make its way onto facebook’s menu. not a bad idea actually.
So anyone have an idea as to what the purchase price was?