Bookmark: Furl.net
Upon installing a new harddrive in my laptop, I needed to reinstall the system. After doing that I was rather annoyed at having to reload some of my settings, including web bookmarks. Additionally, when doing this kind of clean system sweep, I tend to get the itch to try alternative programs. For web browsers, the biggest barrier to trying another program is that all my bookmarks live in my long standing browser of choice - Apple’s Safari. Naturally, I looked for solutions. There are ways to import bookmarks, but then what if I want to go back? There are some programs independent of the browser that keep track of bookmarks, but what if I decide I don’t like that program or I am on a public computer? Quickly, it seemed that some sort of Internet based bookmarking system would be best. This conclusion surprised me a bit, because I’d never been too keen on the idea. The web interfaces always seemed slow and clunky. The benefits of having bookmarks local outweighed the negatives, such as searching and easier organization. Centralizing my data on the Internet never hit it off with me either. But, times are a’ changing.
I looked into the rather popular del.icio.us, but found the site’s design a bit chaotic for my taste and the features weren’t all that appealing. Social bookmarking, the broader category of service provided by del.icio.us, sounds like it may have some benefits. These include browsing what others are frequently bookmarking and the computer recommending bookmarks of interest based on keywords used to describe your bookmarks. Still, I don’t see myself as prioritizing these features or having much time to sort through other people’s bookmarks. And the fact is - some people just bookmark a lot of junk.
Alternatively, I ended up at a bit more of a startup website (but less of a grassroots one, as it is run by LookSmart) called Furl.net. In having to compete with del.icio.us and others, it has some differentiating features that really caught my eye (and I think will impress you too if you like keeping track of things on the Internet). Most impressively, when you bookmark a page of interest through Furl, it saves a copy of the webpage to their server. This webpage is then searchable in your account. Instead of trying to search the whole web for a specific page you found five pages into a google search to reference it, or trying to remember what name the bookmark has in your browser, you can just search your archive for a few keywords that are easily recalled about the webpage. For me this is huge, because I end up on a lot of obscure websites and culling them into my archive really helps differentiate them from all of the bogus hits I get on Google. Another bonus of this feature, especially for those obscure websites, is that if the webpage is taken down or moves, the archive and the information it contains will still be viewable in the Furl archive.
Additionally, like del.icio.us, it is possible to associate many topics with one bookmark. Instead of your browser, in which it is necessary to force a bookmark into one folder, the same bookmark will show up when you look at any one of the topics affiliated with it. For me, this means that to relocate it, at any given time I only have to remember one of the topics I thought the bookmark fit into. Much better odds this way of relocating that old website by the guy that built a monorail in his backyard than if I had one folder name to guess off of.
If, for some odd reason some of you are interested, my Furl archive is viewable online. Since my bookmark series of posts is the easiest, I certainly have some outlandish hopes it will also be the most popular. If so and random web snippets of my interests aren’t droll, take a peek at the Furl archive for an extra helping!