Ten Reasons Why

Take for example, my Outlook/Exchange set up. My job requires I correspond with a couple hundred vendors and academic institutions a year, so, in the past, I've spent a lot of time creating mail folders to keep mail from different sources organized. Forget Outlook's search feature -- with several gigs between my mailbox and archives, Outlook's search performance is near useless.

Enter Lookout, a plug-in for Outlook that indexes your mailbox (and archives and attachments and, if you like, My Documents) in the background. It provides a fairly flexible search interface that responds with googlespeed. Since installing Lookout, I've discovered my Outlook folder heirachy blows chunks. I don't need it anymore. A good search query and I can find most any email I've sent or received via Outlook in the last five years in seconds. Which suddenly means that the four gigs of mail folders and archives ceases to be an almost-static hunk of data and becomes knowledge that I can use.

The lesson (and the point of this post)? A good search obliviates the need for a hierarchy. The conceptual flaw inherent ot most email clients and bookmark managers is the assumption the best way for to make the information useful is to organize it (usually manually) into categories or hierarchies. To be fair, this is probably less a conceptual flaw, than a historical technical limitation -- you need a certain level of processing power and storage space.

Solving for this allowed Google to take a commanding lead in the "finding information" field. At one point in the history of the Web, human-managed hierarchical directories like Yahoo were still a valuable method to get to information kind of like what you wanted. Enter Google. By applying brute force processing power, suddenly a search turns up relevant results, so I don't need the legion of Yahoo indexers as much anymore. (Librarians shudder at this line of thought.)

Furl is more valuable than other bookmark managers, because it indexes the full text of every page I "furl." Not just the page title, not just the metadata I add, but the full text of the page. I quickly did away with categorizing "furled" pages once I realized I can use Furl's fairly decent, Google-like query syntax. That's great because heirarchies are bitch to maintain and keep relevant (just ask Yahoo). Furl is like Lookout for bookmarks. Or, more to the point, it's like Google for bookmarks.

The least important thing Furl does is help you manage bookmarks. More interesting and useful are the social aspects (and, in general, I'm a great fan of recommendation engines of any sort). Clay Shirky hit on these social aspects yesterday as well, posting about social link management on , as did Peter Capula in a post on social bookmarking and other stuff on the Social Software Weblog.

However, the most important thing Furl does is allow you to carve out a sub-section of the web that you're interested in and deal with that sub-section in a Google-like manner, meaning being able to search the full text of the web pages. John Battelle hit the line drive on this back in April, calling it the Personal Web. Bookmarks are a list of page titles. A Personal Web -- like a Furl collection -- is a repository of content. It's the difference between being the card catalog and being the library.