Furl vs. Spurl
December 27th, 2005
I recently made the transition from Furl to Spurl for storing online content. In case you’re new to these services, they are social bookmark managers that, apart from simply bookmarking (like del.icio.us), store full page contents on their servers, allowing for quick searches in the future. Like all other social bookmark managers they allow you to share your bookmarks and provide all sorts of RSS feeds, although they are not as flexible as del.icio.us is in this area.
- Cross browser compatibility. Both services have bookmarklets for adding pages which are supported across a wide variety of browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc).
- Keep a snapshot of the webpage even if the page is no longer available online.
- Search through your archive (all the content you’ve ever saved).
- Search by keywords (tags).
- Search by category.
- Search through other peoples archives (public content only).
- Share bookmarks with other users.
- Export your public bookmarks (all or categories) as an RSS feed or to a blog (Javascript).
- Provide “Recommended Links” based on the content you bookmarked.
Furl advantages over Spurl:
- Furl allows you to export your archive. This includes the content of all the bookmarked pages (in a zip file). Spurl only allows you to export the bookmarks without the content.
- Furl has an option to set the default status of items to “private”. With Spurl, you have to explicitly set the item as private when bookmarking it.
- You can rate the pages you furl. This is a nice thing to have when browsing through your archive (you can sort by ratings).
- Cleaner interface. I think Furl is easier to use for non-techies (my wife uses it).
Spurl advantages over Furl:
- del.icio.us integration. When you add a bookmark to Spurl, it automatically gets added to your del.icio.us account (optional).
- Spurl offers an API. This is very important for the future of the service.
- Spurl offers a cool sidebar panel for IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. This makes searching and browsing Spurl much quicker and easier.
- You can create subcategories.
Feature wise, it is quite a close match. I decided to move to Spurl due to delicious integration, the sidebar panel and the fact that since LookSmart acquired Furl over a year ago, there has been almost no improvements made to the service. Spurl feels much more open and the people behind it appear to be more dedicated to their idea than Furl guys and that’s the type of service I give my trust to.
A note on the move itself. I exported all the bookmarks from Furl and imported them into Spurl. The import took around a day (this is a security not a performance issue) and all the pages were correctly indexed. The bad thing is that my furl tags have been lost in this transition. I wish these services started using a better format for import/export which would contain some meta data.
Another player in this area is Yahoo’s MyWeb, but I’ve dismissed it since it is not elegant to use and lacks openness and some essential stuff such as categories. No, tags are not enough!
Tags: Furl, Spurl, MyWeb, del.icio.us
Hi,
You should have a look at Simpy - it’s more feature-rich than the above, independent, and a bunch of other good stuff.
Comment by Otis Gospodnetic — December 27th, 2005 @ 8:36 pm
Thanks Otis, Simpy looks good. I created an account and imported my spurl bookmarks, but I’m waiting for Simpy to start working with Opera to check it out in detail. I see you’re working on this, hopefully it’ll be resolved soon.
Comment by Ivan — December 28th, 2005 @ 12:47 am
[…] I have many bookmarks. I also have many computers. This poses a problem. Sure, there are firefox extensions and whatnot for sharing bookmarks, but what about when I’m at school? At someone else’s house, either as a friend or as tech support? There are a few solutions for bookmark management out there. del.icio.us is popular, but that only goes so far. Some more advanced ones are Furl and Spurl. After reading a few interesting articles at Brooble’s Blog, specifically this one, I decided that it was time to consolidate my bookmarks in one place, so I decided to use Spurl. His site has all the details of the differences, but I’ll point out some features that I really like. Spurl’s Notable Features […]
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[…] Furl vs. Spurl […]
Pingback by Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth?! » Del.icio.us, Furl, and Spurl — January 24th, 2006 @ 12:59 pm
Hi there,
Thanks for the thorough summary about Furl and Spurl…
It’s great to hear from someone who’s been there, done that.
You motivated me to get started with Spurl today!
I really appreciated your comparisons between Furl and Spurl. And thanks to Otis, I’ll also have a look at Simpy.
Comment by Lynnette — January 24th, 2006 @ 9:27 pm
Another advantage of Spurl over Furl (and Yahoo! My Web) is that it allows you to link to your cached copies without having to be logged-in; meaning other users can see copies of pages that have gone off line. this is very important for the casual web historian (when archive.com doesn’t help) and for issues where prosecution causes content to disappear quickly.
Unfortunately Spurl’s UTF-8 support is poor and this causes pages in encodings other than Latin to be garbled; with the hope that they can be fixed one day soon.
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Comment by LiYang — October 16th, 2006 @ 3:09 am
Hi, thanks for posting this information. I have been contemplating what else to use (Furl user). The search engine within Furl (to search your personal stored archive) has been broke (errors out) on the furl site and I had sent in an email to Furl support - with no response in the last week. An app like this is pretty useless without a search (let alone support!).
Chuck
Comment by chuck — January 15th, 2007 @ 9:37 pm
[…] While the tags for Del.icio.us and diggit! were with me from Ramani’s blog, I was lucky to stumble upon this site. It has additional hotlinks and I got the “submit” URL from there. Here is how the code goes:http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=http://www.broobles.com/blog/posts/46&t=Furl+vs.+Spurl […]
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