When you read — or more accurately, skim — as much as I do online, one of the more frustrating problems is tracking down an article you’ve read before. I will often remember only snippets of an article I need to refer to, and won’t be able to recall where it was published. Or I’ll remember where it ran, but can’t find it on the site. Or it will have moved into the archives or be otherwise inaccessible. Simple bookmarks/favorites are of almost no use, since they are hard to annotate and keep track of (see my April 2003 column, Blow Up Your Bookmarks).
To address this problem, I have been testing a new, free service at Furl.net (it’s still in beta, so there might be little kinks that need fixing). The site, which takes its name from “File URLs,” has done no marketing or publicity, relying, instead, on word-of-keyboard. I learned of it from my friend Seshu Badrinath, a blogger and an ESPN.com photo editor.
Seshu writes:
I surf the Internet at a manic pace, looking for information about photographers, tools for my Macintosh, opinion-editorials, etc. I am sure you have your own search habits.In the few days I have been testing Furl, I have found it to be one of the most useful add-ons to my browser, allowing me to organize articles and save them in an online filing cabinet. Think of it as the equivalent of the “save this” and “e-mail this” links that some websites offer, except that this works on almost every page of the Internet.
In the end, it’s just too many URLs to remember or save to your favorites list. If you want to find that NYTimes article before they lock it up and charge you $2.95 to read it again, you may be out of luck. There has been no clear way to organize all those many links that we tell ourselves we’ll be sure to visit again.
Well, today, I came across a new online tool. You may have already heard about it. It’s free to sign up and use.
Here’s how it works on my PC and Internet Explorer (for other browsers and platforms, see this set of instructions). I installed the Furl Toolbar, which took seconds to download and positioned itself right below the indispensable Google Toolbar. As I read articles I wanted to save, I just hit the “Furl It” button, bringing up a popup window in which I can write comments about the article, rate it on a scale of one to five, put it into one of many customized categories (business, politics, entertainment — you can name your own) and e-mail it to friends. Once saved into your archive you can find articles through a personalized search engine.
An intriguing feature is the ability to see what others have been saving (or “furling,” in the site’s lingo), because items are public by default. You can choose to make any of your articles private, though I am sure there are folks who’d like everything they save to automatically be private.
Unlike most web-page saving tools out there, Furl is more oriented toward articles (which is what journalists need), stores documents as originally intended (i.e. HTML, PDF, DOC — not in proprietary formats) and works on a variety of browsers. Having everything be online is especially useful, since you can access it from a variety of computers. You can also share specific categories of links with specific friends on a regular basis. Using Furl could help a team of reporters and editors working on a project share articles and resources of interest.
The service also differs from blogs in the sense that the traditional blog layout doesn’t allow you to assign different levels of importance to particular items or give you such easy control over the articles themselves. And unlike blogs, you can continue to access articles that have disappeared into archives (though your friends cannot access, say, your saved copy of a WSJ.com article, since that would raise copyright issues).
To see all this in action, you can login using “demo” as the username and password.
The service is run as a personal project by Michael Giles of Amherst, Mass., who works for a software development company. He says online storage is “so cheap that I can offer this without charge.” I presume eventually, there will be a paid version with more features.
Please note: using the Google Toolbar or other popup blocking software means the Furl popup window may get suppressed when you try to Furl something. With Google, I have to hold down the CTRL key when hitting the “Furl It” button.
This site reminds me of Snurl.com (a.k.a. SnipURL.com), a service that shortens URLs (see my 2003 column, Shorter Links, Please). Not only do the names rhyme, they make our surfing lives easier.
[ See follow-up column of reader responses written Jan. 27, 2004: http://livex.poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=59924 ]
Your turn: send me sites you like at poynter@sree.net.
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