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.

Both Furl and Spurl perform their job well in the basic areas of online bookmarking with content saving:

• 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

I’ve been a great fan of RSS Bandit during the last year, but a few issues made me look for a replacement. While RSS Bandit remains a fantastic reader (synchronization is the best one out there) and one I’ll be watching closely for further releases, here are the things that I couldn’t live with:

• Performance got really, really bad. I’m subscribed to ~200 feeds, and even though I regularly purge items on high volume feeds, RSS Bandit is now taking forever to startup (load the feeds).
• Feeds get mixed up. Basically, items appear all over the place. This happens intermitently but is still very annoying when it does.
• The built in browser is extremelly slow and I got tired of having to open each web page in Opera.
• The built in browser does not support full screen view.
• New releases are not made as often as needed to keep the userbase satisfied (bug fixes, new features)

So, I had a thorough look at other RSS readers and after trying the latest versions of many of them, I settled with GreatNews. After a couple of weeks of using it in parallel with RSS Bandit, I’ve been using it exclusively for the past month. Here are the key differentiators about GreatNews:

• Really, really fast. It is backed up by a sqlite database and doesn’t use .Net
• It’s developer is putting a lot of effort into the usability of the application. Reading feeds with just clicking the Space key is a pleasure (and minimizes risks of RSI). Keyboard navigation is well thought out and works well.
• Although the built in browser is based on IE, it is fast. It also has full screen browsing.
• Out of the box support for del.icio.us and Furl. Adding other social services (such as Spurl) is a 5 second process.
• Development is very active and forum support is first class. New features are being added on a weekly basis.
• Runs on a USB drive, making synchronization a no-brainer (it does synchronize with Bloglines, but this is quite slow).
• Supports labeling. You define your own labels (RSS Bandit only supports predefined labels).

The things I miss:

• Cross channel search

Tags: RSS Bandit, GreatNews, RSS Reader

Even though RSS has picked up greatly during the past year, there is a great amount of sites that still provide email newsletters only. While going through my email, I am usually not in the “news” mode, so my news folder is full of unread mail. In order to deal with this I moved all of my newsletter subscriptions over to MailFeed, so I can scan them fastly in my RSS reader when my mind is open to all sorts of news.

MailFeed is a new service (beta of course), perfect for subscribing to newsletters or email notifications and reading them in your RSS reader. All emails sent to something@mailfeed.org are available via RSS on http://mailfeed.org/rss2/something which you can subscribe to from any aggregator. Note that some web aggregators, such as Bloglines, offer a similar feature, but you can access these only from that specific aggregator (or a reader that can sync with them). Even better, MailFeed does not require you to register at all and you can use as many email addresses as you want, which allows you to simulate plus addressing found in regular email services.

The fact that you don’t have to subscribe to MailFeed leads to some privacy issues and you should be aware of them before starting to use the service.

Tags: MailFeed, RSS Email