Solo Technology

After last night’s “challenges” with Simpy, I’m happy to say that Otis had responded to my support request and followed up with some more comments here. Dude must not sleep much! Anyways, my imported links showed up and I’m happy.

Used it a bit today and am generally pleased. Was just a bit too swamped at the office to really surf much, but did find a couple links over lunch that I was able to quickly tag as “ToRead” and toss into the pile. Having my bookmarks public is going to be interesting… the world will see how I tend to let my “to read” pile build for weeks!

Just for grins, I gave Furl a look this evening. My first impression was … not good. Just the interface rubbed me wrong, but I figured I shouldn’t be quite so hasty. So I signed up and had a deeper look. Was almost done immediately as I misread some of the intro pages — it sure looked like the only way to use the thing was with a toolbar. And I “just say no” to toolbars! But, after I reread things I found the usual bookmarklet available and got to business.

These guys don’t just save the bookmark — they save the whole page! Woah… that surprised me a bit. When you are looking at your own personal archive you can choose to visit the link -or- view the saved copy of the page. Interesting concept.

The Furl UI is “average”. It doesn’t hurt the eyes at least, nor does it excite me overly much. It is certainly functional and clean and tolerable. Performance seems fine too.

The link saving method is not quite my cup of tea. Kind of a belts and suspenders approach. Not only do you choose a category (or multiple categories), but you can also set some keywords. For the moment I think I’ll just grab one category per post and sprinkle in a few keywords and pretend they’re like tags… Useablility for me suffers a bit though. The other services keep your previously used tag list around and/or even suggest tags that other used. Didn’t see that with Furl so far. Makes things a bit tedious.

There appears to be a del.icio.us importer that I’m trying right now… [later: with zero success, I might add]

Something I’d like to see from both Furl and Simpy is the ability to easily search outside of my own stuff. I want to be able to define a few tags and put a “watch” on ‘em and keep an eye on what other people are finding. Maybe they have that already, but I’ve not found it yet.

One Response to “Social Bookmarking, day 3”

1. Michael on January 19th, 2006 10:53 pm
   

   Hi, thanks for taking a look at Furl.net. You’re right that the fact Furl saves the full text of the document is a big difference. It means you can search the full-text of the articles you’ve saved, which gives you your own personal web index. It also means that if the web page comes down or goes behind a costwall, you can still read it at will.

   “Topics” in Furl are the same as tags. You can find them tracked as tags on Technorati, for example, and a lot of people just use the “New topic” box in the save dialog for entering new tags whenever they want. If it matches a pre-existing “Topic”, Furl is smart enough to figure out they’re the same. But you’re right that save dialog could be smoother, and we’ll have that out soon.

   For watching a topic, you can do that in RSS (use “http://furl.net/members/rss.xml?topic=TAG” for the TAG you want to watch) or in HTML (use “http://furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=TAG” similarly).

   You can do the same with the most popular items of the day (e.g., “http://furl.net/members/rssPopular.xml?days=1&topic=technology”for RSS or “http://furl.net/furledPopular.jsp?days=1&topic=technology”).

   There’s also a great “Furl Search” on the Furl site that allows you to search through all of the documents referenced by the publicly saved URLs. This makes a specialized form of web index built by the Furl community, with surprisingly good results.

   Hope that helps!

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