Furl: Bookmarks Done Right
So for many years (as my old buds on the FutureCulture mailing list will attest) I’ve moaned about the problems I have with bookmarks (aka “favorites” if you prefer Microsoft branding). Most importantly, I hated the fact that my bookmarks on my work machine were separate from my bookmarks on my home machine. Why isn’t this information hosted online so I can access it from anyplace.
I’ve tried various solutions over the years. Recently, a glimmer of hope came from a Mozilla Firefox extension, Bookmark Synchronizer which let me keep the bookmarks in sync between multiple machines.
But now I’m hooked on Furl, a free service. You stick a “Furl It!” bookmark in your browser toolbar, and click that when you want to archive a page. It pops up a window that lets you add the link, an excerpt you’ve highlighted, comments, and keywords to your Furl account. Links can be categorized (in multiple categories). Plus, Furl caches a copy of the page and indexes it, so the page and metadata are searchable. You can import/export your links in various browser bookmark formats or raw XML.
If that’s not enough, you can rate the pages you save & they’ve just built in a recommendation engine to suggest new pages, based on your ratings — found a gazillion neat pages and tools through that today. Also, Furl links are share-able. See mine. And you can subscribe via RSS to someone’s public Furl bookmarks.
Whew. That’s a lot of features.
The Furl It! bookmarklet has been giving Mozilla Firefox 0.8 some trouble, though. So far that’s been the only hiccup. Long term? We’ll see. Furl has no revenue model right now (though I expect Google Ads could generate them some money). In any event, if we’re lucky we’ll see a spate of Furl-like services arise.
Now pardon me while I go kick myself in the ass for not finding a way to implement this idea when I had it six or seven years ago.
Have you tried it with 0.9?
FURL is cool enough, I guess, but I’ve been a bit surprised by the hype surrounding it, given that web-based bookmark managers have been around for a while now (cf. http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Web_Applications/Bookmark_Managers/). I know, I know, it’s not *just* a web-based bookmark management system, it’s ’social software.’ True enough, the RSS feeds and the ability to rank urls across the entire system is new and pretty cool. My personal favourite used to be Backflip, and one feature they had which if FURL would implement would make me even more interested was the ability to let other authorized users contribute to your categories of urls. Suddenly this becomes a really easy shared research tool, or a way for a group of students to pool their reasearch.
Cheers, Scott.
A few comments from the folks at Furl. If you are having any Firefox issues, please let us know. We test with Firefox regularly and the latest Furl It button (released last week) eliminated any issues we knew of.
As for Scott’s comments on groups, that functionality is currently under development and will hopefully be available in a week or so. It will definitely be a welcome addition and the shared research use case is one of the items we are working to support.
Also, one big difference between Furl and the pool of web bookmarking tools that came before is your ability to recall items that you saved. When you save something with Furl, you save the whole page (not just the link) and can search across the full text and view your saved copy if the original is gone (or in archives). I don’t know about you, but within a few months of saving something I am often hard pressed to remember my comments (or categorization). So the ability to do a quick search and find it again is a big improvement.
Anthony — I haven’t upgraded to Firefox 0.9 yet because many extensions break. Some of the critical extensions I use haven’t been updated for 0.9 yet.
Scott — As Mike indicated, the real difference with Furl is that it indexes the full text of every page you bookmark. In this sense, it’s not a bookmark manager, but a search tool.
Mike — The Furl bookmarklet works fine on Firefox 0.8 on my home WinXP computer, but not on my office WinXP machine (also Firefox 0.8). I suspect there’s some Firefox extension or random configuration causing the problem, but I haven’t taken the time to rule out the possibilities.
Furl News
Latest MentionsThousands of people are using Furl on a daily basis and loving it. You can read about it …
Furl News
Latest MentionsThousands of people are using Furl on a daily basis and loving it. You can read about it …
Furl News
Latest MentionsThousands of people are using Furl on a daily basis and loving it. You can read about it …