Furl Review

Furl is an online social bookmarking site that is part of the Looksmart family of websites.

Furl employs a more user-friendly interface and attempts to add more features than del.icio.us.

Like any of the social bookmarking sites, Furls uses a bookmarklet to enable users to easily bookmark a page. When bookmarking a page, users can add the Title, URL, Rating, Topic, Keywords, Comments and Clip. Keywords function as “tags”. I don’t know why they did not choose to use the term “tags” since that is the term generally used.

Furl has predetermined topics to which bookmarks can be added. These topics are in addition to any keyword that a user may assign. Both methods are used to faciliate sharing among users. I am not sure why the dual funcitionality exists. It would be better if Furl used it similarly to Spurl. Spurl uses folders and tags to facilitate organization while only tags are used for sharing.

Furl does have the ability to make items private. However, this only occurs if a bookmark is placed in a topic that is labeled as private. This is a little bit of an improvement over del.icio.us. It seems to me that the public/private switch should be on the bookmark itself not on the folder, keyword or topic.

Furl users are able to “subscribe” to other Furl users. These subscriptions produce “headlines” in the users account whenever a new bookmark is added.

Furl also has the standard “Latest” and “Most Popular” bookmark sections.

Overall, it does not seem that Furl substantially improves the social bookmarking experience over and above del.icio.us. The look and feel is much more user friendly, but in terms of features there is not anything that truly distinguishes Furl from del.icio.us.