iSMOblog

Furl…yet another social bookmarking site. So… what’s new in this one? Simply nothing. It’s just like its contemporaries and offers no special features to its users. Neither does it focus on any special particular section of population like Connotea, nor does it displays the peer- reviewed links on the homepage like CiteULike. Still, its users love it. And that’s because of its sheer simplicity.

The Furl team offers you services in various different domains. Lets briefly and ‘simply’ discuss each of these so that it’s easier for you to make your own judgment about Furl and whether you should use it or not.

Furl allows you to save a webpage and then this webpage is stored on an archive. This means that you can access it even when the website server is down. Tagging or assigning topics to a particular webpage or to a group of similar webpages can be done. Performing bulk actions, adding comments, clippings and personal ratings (from one to five) and link validation are some of the features most loved by its users.

The Furl search system indexes the URLs that you publicly save. Thus, searching and sharing becomes really easy. People can send the links to their friends through e-mails and that to with just a click of a button.

Furl allows you to search your own webpage index. You can thus search for a particular bookmark quickly without scrolling through the bookmark list. You can also search using ‘topics’ or ‘keywords’ or ‘tags’. The customization of search is possible.

Just like other social bookmarking websites, you can see the list of others who have saved the same page as yours, other pages saved by them etc. The only different thing here is that Furl recommends you the links to some of the topics that might interest you. This is done on the basis of your activity on their site.

You can declare a particular tag or topic ‘private’ to prevent it from being viewed by others. You can also specify your preferences if you do not wish your ‘public tags’ to be available through the Furl search engine.

Importing and exporting through different sites and browsers is really very easy. Furl supports a variety of formats to make your work easier. No one else can match the service of getting RSS feeds from this site, for sure.

The minor problem that the users of this site face and which they wish to change is the thumbnail view of their bookmarks. They would even love to have a side bar indicating which other users have bookmarked which other similar kind of pages which might be of use to them.

In totality, Furl is a simple social bookmarking website with no extraordinary features. And if one you are one of those people who believe in the motto- ‘Simple living and high thinking’, then this side is undoubtedly made to serve you. So go ahead and have fun with Furl!