Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Furl Is Going Down 
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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?
Comments on this entry:
Now there are only del.icio.us, Simpy and Mister Wong left. Stumbleupon is something different. Strange that not more people use this services. For me social bookmarking is as essential as reading newsfeeds.
BTW, Otis, I noticed two bugs in Simpy that kept me from changing to it:
- I imported my bookmarks from del.icio.us but Simpy showed no tags in the tag section on the right. In the bookmark section on the left the bookmarks had their tags correctly beneath them. I think Simpy has a problem with tags containing special glyphs (*, äöü, & etc.).
- When you rename a tag, Simpy will show your private tags on your user page (I mean simpy.com/user/abc). You have to rename twice to make them disappear again.
Please check this out.
It's really a shame how LookSmart abandoned Furl.
The CEO actually called it Furl.com in a conference call in November.
Shame really. I think they will get a buyer but it won't be for too much. Likely they will give it to a client like the NYTimes as a tit-for-tat for some ad business.
Like they gave Grub to Wikia for ad consideration.
Shame, I liked Furl.
Puschel:
Are you sure about the tags not appearing? When did that happen, what is your username, and are tags still not showing?
If you have a concrete example of a tag with non-alphanumeric characters or with diacritics and it doesn't seem to be behaving correctly, please let me know. That should all be working well.
Regarding private tags showing up - to rename a tag you need to be logged in, and as a ogged in user you get to see your private tags. Also, if anything that you renamed is showing (e.g. on your profile page), just hit reload in your browser - it's likely the browser cache. Please let me know if this isn't so.
Mike:
Yes, Furl.com, I heard that. Pretty bad. What does NYTimes to with Furl anyway? I don't see *any* hint of Furl on NYTimes.
Mike:
Oh, and on emore thing. You said you liked Furl. Why? What was appealing about Furl? Thanks!
To puschel and Otis: The behavior I've observed is that Top Tags doesn't seem to update itself for a day or so after you've made changes to your bookmarks; maybe that's what puschel is seeing. If you use Smarky to access your Simpy bookmarks, the tags list in Smarky updates itself immediately.
pikadudeno1:
That was the case for a few weeks until about a week ago. You should see tag changes immediately now - I see them immediately.
Ok, I just tried to verify my bug reportings. I wasn't able to verify the first one (missing tags on right side) but am sure I had this problem when I tried simpy a couple of weeks ago. Everything I imported from del.icio.us to my simpy testaccount showed up on the right side.
But now check this out: http://www.simpy.com/user/puscheltest
There you see a tag *** which contains no bookmarks. I have one bookmark tagged *** and set that to private. Nevertheless it shows up on my simpy userpage. You can now make it disappear by renaming any of my tags. Please try it out - it's just a testaccount.
puschel:
I do not see the *** tag on:
http://www.simpy.com/user/puscheltest/links
I do see that tag on:
http://www.simpy.com/user/puscheltest
(this would be the bug, right?)
Was the link with the *** tag private from the very beginning? Or was it public and then you made it private?
Otis: I wouldn't trust the second graph :-)
Yes, I meant http://www.simpy.com/user/puscheltest. It shouldn't be there. Rename one of the other tags and it will disappear from that page.
I made the link private after I imported it.
The second graph couldn't be real :-)
Michael:
What makes you think it's not real?
Philipp:
Even if doesn't show the actual numbers, would you agree it shows the usage pattern? I know with Simpy it showed a change once better spam detection was put in place.
puschel:
I now know what you are referring to. That behaviour was made like that intentionally, for technical reasons and because it is not absolutely crucial to hide tags immediately - the URL is the main thing to hide once a bookmark is made private.
Otis:
I too like furl, and this news is sad for me. I'm currently registered to furl and simpy, no delicious and other.
Furl lacked a working firefox extension (I reported that to them almost 18 months ago), but I love it because I can save a page *exactly* as it appears and then look at it months or years later.
two uses that I do:
- temperature history graph saved, like for example: http://www.accuweather.com/forecast-climo.asp?partner=accuweather&traveler=1&zipChg=1&zipcode=02101&metric=0&mnYr=2/1/2008
in 20 days this page will disappear
- google news: it doesn't store the news database forever, so some searches are "furled" to save the links to the news websites and other stuffs.
I use furl and simpy together, theyr offers do not overlap, are orthogonal. Just yesterday I was thinking how cool a simpy-furl cooperation would be..
I personall would suggest you to buy furl, since you say that simpy is making money rigth now you might be able to afford it with some venture funding ;)
pieggi:
Buying Furl is an interesting idea...
As for caching/saving pages, Simpy can do that, too, though this feature is disabled for now (but it is likely this will change in the near future).
I've used furl for years (from Firefox) to save business and health research articles, and have over 800 articles saved. They've never supported it well. The search function rarely works. The filing and indexing is extremely weak; why can't users create sub-files? I used to be able to share my archive with a list of non-furlers, but that feature was removed with the redesign. And the redesign, while pretty, is a navigational nightmare. I only keep using it now because I can't find anything better. Yahoo has some kind of bookmark feature but it's even weaker than Furl.
Looksmart has never developed Furl for what it's ideally suited for (from the providers' point of view anyway): targeted advertising. How easy would it be to deliver content-related ads based on the type of stories users save? Right now I don't see how, without ads, LookSmart is making any money from Furl, so no wonder they want to dump it.
I am afraid looksmart will simply drop it and I'll lose all my carefully accumulated research.
brownrice:
Ouch, doesn't sound pretty.
Is there a way for you to export your Furl bookmarks and import them into Simpy?
brownrice:
CiteULike sounds like what you might be looking for. I use it to keep track of scientific research papers. There are other similar services as well, which I discovered through the Wikipedia entry on "Social bookmarking"
http://www.citeulike.org
Good blog. I've been going to furl off and on for a few years now and it just seemed like things started going downhill last winter... Finally go to this blog and it seems like a reasonable explanation
JAJA, UPYACHKA! UG NE PROIDET, BLYA!
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