Furl vs del.icio.us December 1, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, internet , trackbackFurl vs del.icio.us
Two useful web services, both social bookmarking tools with overlapping functions but significant differences. You don’t really want to use both in parallel so what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
Q First what is social bookmarking?
A Sharing the URLs to possibly interesting websites you have found, with others online.
Q Why would I want to do that?
A For many reasons, both social and selfish. By matching your research interests with others you might benefit from the combined results of many different individuals’ unique browsing activities. less stones left unturned. By keeping your bookmarks online you can use them and add to them from any computer wherever you are.
COMMON FEATURES
Both allow you to bookmark websites as you come across them, just by clicking a bookmarklet which you install on your browser’s toolbar.
You have to register an account first, and login once on each computer where you want access. There is no charge for this.
Both allow you to then publish a link to your online bookmarks, and an RSS feed for people to subscribe to. Both attempt to help you find more websites from other people who are bookmarking the same kind of stuff.
ADVANTAGES OF del.icio.us
* You use tags rather than categories to label your bookmarks. Tags are more flexible, you just type them in like keywords when you add a link, and it’s then simple to view any links from other people who have used the same tags. This is the same system which Flickr uses for labeling shared photographs - social tagging . I prefer it to the older more rigid system of first creating a category, and then assigning your entry to a category, perhaps primary and secondary or multiple categories. Tagging has been enabled by the power of searching superceeding indexing.
* del.icio.us may have a larger user base, or a better informed one compared to Furl which was launched more recently.
*minimalist interface, if you like that sort of thing - no ads.
ADVANTAGES of FURL
* Saves not just a link but a copy of the webpage you are looking at, into your personal archive. This enables fast searching of the content of all the websites you’ve Furled - possibly the clincher. Also useful for making backup copies of a website at a particular time, frozen for you as a safeguard against loss. ( I furl my own, too )
* doesn’t have a silly name with dots in it!
* Makes recommendations based on items which people who have furled similar things to you, have furled recently. A bit like
Amazon.co.uk when it says “people who bought this book also bought these CDs….”
PROGNOSIS
I think Furl will attract more new furlers through recommendation because it’s easier to get started following the instructions, and the script they provide for publishing latest Furls on your blog is a good advertisment. The organisation was recently bought up by Looksmart and continues to develop, so perhaps they will embrace the tagging system more fully or do something more to bring the categories together. del.icio.us will remain the preserve of geeks and academics, which may have an upside as well as the opposite.
I use Furl a lot more than del.icio.us, similarly to the way Alan Levine describes but if I had started using del.icio.us first, it may be a different story.
So whichever your preference, if you haven’t already - get started with social bookmarking today.
other articles of note:
Digging into del.icio.us on Weblogg-ed
How do you use del.icio.us - by Roland Piquepaille
10 cool things to do with Furl - by Amy Gahran
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
I hadn’t heard of either of these before; thanks for the links.
Following a trackback here…
Social bookmarkig is just the tip of an interesting iceberg in the tools available now to link together a variety of ones in interesting ways– see the workshop we did related to these tools and learning objects that also weave in Bloglines, Flickr, and a few more:
http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ObjectsEducause04
I’ve started using both today and so far my preference would go to del.icio.us
The reason is simple, it does not *require* to install any stuff (e.g. javascript) on the browsing machine, while I couldn’t get furl to grab anything, although they claim it is virtually usable on any machine.
A feature lacked on both services is a real user community grouping - I’d love to see something like LiveJournal’s emerge.
Notwithstandingly, I found it nice and would recommend it. Too bad there’s such a level of noise, but it’s the principle, ne ?
I also had trouble searching specific stuff, but I’m not sure it’s the point anyway…
I’ve used Furl every day for several months, dragging the marklet to my toolbar is the first thing I do when I sit at any computer. The recomendations are great, especially the recomended other people to subscribe to. Furl has gone down 3 times in the last 6 months or so, in my experience, but the search, cache and recomendations are all enough for me to prefer it. I do need to compare it with Spurl, however.
I wish delicious wasn’t so damn hip. I think many more people use it. It’s not proprietary either, correct? That is nice. Furl is from Lycos. I don’t mind adsense ads, though, I like to know, for example, which RSS aggregator companies are paying the big bucks when I furl a site re RSS.
Currently, I’m doing Technorati Tag searches for both tools, and it kinda looks like more people are building extensions off of delicious, probably because it’s hip and because it’s open source. Hmmmmm…..I’ll probably use both in the long run, but furl primarily. thanks for the comparision, such posts are suprisingly hard to come by and are very useful.