This is another installment in the Social Bookmarking Showdown

LookSmart’s Furl is an old standby in the social bookmarking scene with a rich feature set, excellent export formats and a plethora of metadata options. To be honest, I had forgotten about Furl. Luckily for me, the savvy readers of this blog corrected my oversight.

Furl works according to the same principles that should be familiar by now if you’re following this series. To aid in the collecting of bookmarks, Furl offers bookmarklets for your browser or, if you use IE or Firefox, you can download and install a toolbar which will give you access to your bookmarks without having to go to the site.

Sharing and searching features are on par with the field and, Furl caches bookmarked pages for you. Furl also allows you to export your archives, cached pages and all, to a zip file for easy backup. All your bookmarks are available via RSS as well.

Furl offers tagging, though it refers to tags as “topics,” and also adds the ability to save keywords. I’m not really clear on what the difference between “topics” and “keywords” is other than what the FAQ says: “the keywords you assign are search hints.” But aren’t tags search hints as well since I can search my bookmarks by tag?

Furl also allows you to save considerably more metadata than competing services. In fact the edit form is almost overwhelming, but thankfully you needn’t provide any more than a url and title. For those that like to store more information about their bookmarks, this is the site for you.

Furl offers one thing I haven’t found on other sites, the ability to leave comments on other people’s bookmarks. Naturally Furl has privacy controls so if you don’t want comments on your bookmarks, you can make the bookmarks private. The comments feature allows people to stop by and say “hey, if you liked this you might like…” all without you having to lift a finger.

Furl also offers a number of export options above an beyond the ordinary HTML/XML formats that most of these sites use. With Furl you can export your bookmarks to some obscure formats like MLA, APA, Chicago, CBE, BibTeX, RIS/EndNote citations. Just to test this out I exported my del.icio.us bookmarks to HTML, imported those into Furl and then exported them again as BibTex and I am happy to report that it worked. This could be very handy for academics and other authors who frequently collect and quote online sources.

The Low Down

Pros

• Excellent wide range of export options
• Browser toolbars available (IE and Firefox only)
• Caches page and allows export of cached pages

Cons

• Organizational options are limited
• No thumbnails

Previously Reviewed:
del.icio.us
ma.gnolia
Wink
StumbleUpon