Social bookmarking is becoming quite a common thing online, and hundreds of internet users are discovering the advantages of storing and sharing bookmarks instead of trying to make sense of a huge pile of disorganized “favorites”. Furl adds a new dimension to the paradigm by not only saving a list of web pages that you add, but also saving copies of the pages themselves.

Essentially, Furl lets you keep track of all the obscure websites you come across while surfing and easily find them again whenever you want. Search through your “Furled” websites from any computer, or share them with your friends and help them discover new web pages too.

Getting Started

Signing up on the Furl.net homepage is quite simple and straightforward. As soon as you’ve selected your username and password, you’ll be prompted to add a “bookmarklet” (a customized button) to your browser toolbar. Clicking the bookmarklet at any time adds the page you’re currently viewing to your Archive, and pops up a little window where you can enter information about that page to help you find it later. You can rate each page from 1 to 5, make it private or public, file it under one or more specific topics and add as many keywords as you like. There are even fields for you to type a comment and add a clipping from the page, both nice touches.

“Furling” web pages is almost effortless. The bookmarklets are completely browser independent, and should work perfectly no matter which one you use. Just keep clicking your bookmarklet while you surf as usual, enter details for each web page and you’re done.

Once you’ve “Furled” a healthy number of web pages, you’ll see your Archive page fill out nicely. The Archive has a search field right on top, and using it will display three distinct sets of results - those from your archive, those from the entire Furl community and a general search of the web as well. Of course every result has a handy “Furl It” link next to it, so your Archive can grow exponentially each time you find more pages that meet your interests. Viewing the listing of pages in your archive will then also show related links that other members have Furled.

The Archive

But by far the coolest thing about the Archive is that two distinct versions of it are automatically created for you – your private Archive and your public one. Your private Archive contains all the pages you don’t want the rest of the world to see. In addition, the private Archive contains an exact copy of each web page you added, while the public one has only a link to it. This means that you’ll always be able to see a page the way it was when you Furled it, even if it is updated a dozen times a day!

The other distinct advantage to this is you can Furl pages that are password protected or require you to sign in, for example the New York Times. If you click on your Furled link, you’ll be able to see the page as it is, but everyone else will be taken to that websites’ login screen. This is also a great way to avoid trouble with copyright enforcement agencies, since your Furled content won’t be visible to others unless they have a password as well.

So why would anyone want to store copies of websites online? The most obvious advantage is that you can get to those stored copies from anywhere, and you’ll always have it even after the site is updated or shuts down. The second advantage is that if you ever suffer a hard disk crash or computer failure, you can rest assured that your data is safe on a remote server!

Other Fun Stuff

Furl fully supports RSS, so you can create a feed of all the websites you surf through and send it along to likeminded people for them to go through at leisure. Just tell them to add “http://www.furl.net/members/yourusername/rss.xml” to their RSS aggregators and they’ll be ready to go. The feeds can be further customized by topic; you’ll find detailed instructions on Furl’s help page. If your friends aren’t all that tech savvy, you can also have a daily email sent to them which will contain links to all the pages you’ve Furled that day. Finally, if you have a blog or website of your own, you can publish a list of links to it automatically.