Furl
One of my clients asked me to review Furl, a service that archives Web pages at the request of its users. I took a quick look at it tonight using its demo mode. Some of the useful features include the ability to add comments and categories to the pages, a search engine, and the option to e-mail what you save to other people. There’s a Furl button to add to a Web browser to make it easy to archive pages. Users can import bookmark lists from selected browsers and export their Furl archive. Each account has an RSS feed. There’s a system so users can recommend pages to each other.
The search seems to be a keyword search only. When I searched on “blog,” for example, I only retrieved a few results of pages mentioning “blog,” not some of the blogs I saw on the list. Categories are customizable, so users could create a category for blogs.
I was impressed at how it archives pages. It seems to make an exact copy of the page, complete with working links, ads, and images.
I’m not sure about copyright compliancy. I found archived news articles in the archive and other copyrighted material.
Addendum 5/3: I think the community aspect of Furl is something that makes it unique and potentially more valuable than just an archive of Web pages. I can search for other users and see what things they’ve archived. I could imagine using this with a remote client or being able to share links with people throughout the office, especially for sharing pages where data changes frequently. People frequently ask librarians to share their bookmarks and knowledge of Web sites. Librarians frequently like to learn about different resources their patrons use. Dumping those lists into Furl could really facilitate sharing. Imagine being able to easily share bookmarks with other hobbyists, library users, congregation members, classmates, professional colleagues, book group junkies, etc.
(To some extent, blogs do this, but in a totally different manner. To say, for example, Furl is like frassle doesn’t work for me. Combining the two could create a really nifty tool, though, but I would hate to see frassle turn into nothing more than a list of annotated bookmarks without the blog component.)
I could also see it as a way to track our own frequently changing Web pages to keep a record of what was there yesterday or last week, since we don’t do that now. Imagine having this tool on 9/11 and being able to capture Web sites for CNN, the New York Times, and other major news organizations as the day developed. (Yes, I know there are some sites that archived news on September 11, 2001.)
Addendum 5/14: Furl picked up this blog post.
May 3rd, 2004 at 6:07 pm
I was planning to blog about my experiences with furl, but it seems that (as usual) you have beat me to the post
.
I have been experimenting with furl for a couple of months now, and I really love it. It is less intimidating to me than del.icio.us, and I like that it captures pages (although I wonder about the copyright issue, too). For me, maintaining my furl archive is more enjoyable than maintaining my weblog, since I love gathering information but hate summarizing and compiling polished comments on things that I have gathered/read.
Over the weekend, while the Harvard blog server was down, I spent the time I had scheduled for blogging playing with furl and adding and categorizing links. Right now, most of my archive is private, but I am starting to make some on my links and categories public (see the “local bookish delights” link on my blog). At some point this week, I will add a furl linkroll, if I have the time and energy to mess with my template.
May 15th, 2004 at 8:59 pm
Have you seen Simpy yet? If you like Furl, you’ll really like Simpy, I think.