I've been meaning to write a thorough post on the current state of the social bookmarking services, but I never have enough time for it. However, I have been tracking a few of the more popular services and I just have to share my views on Furl.
In short, I think Furl is going down.
Despite a recent redesign and despite the recent full rewrite (Furl went from Java to Ruby and Ruby on Rails, apparently), the service seems to be going down hill. Look, for example, at Furl's performance over the last 10 days:
Pretty bad, no? Look at the bottom-right corner of that graph. You can see that already horrible performance got even worse in the last two days. Who'd want to use such a slow service? Every service experiences problems, of course. Simpy had its share of those. But Furl's performance doesn't seem to be on Furl team's TODO list. Perhaps they don't care - Looksmart, the company that owns Furl, is apparently looking to sell Furl - see furl-user group post.
But there is more. Look how Looksmark's activity dropped suddenly several months ago:
That's one sharp drop! And it doesn't seem to be recovering. Furl apparently has 1.6M users and about 27M bookmarks (see here). These number are actually not that impressive (comparing them to Simpy), especially when you consider all the marketing and cross-promoting that Furl got/gets, when you consider there is/was a team of people working on Furl, and so on.
With such poor performance, zero growth, etc., I wonder why anyone would buy Furl?
What do you think? Are there any Furl users here? Any past Furl users?
