Once you see an interesting web site, how do you ever find it again? Do you save it to your local hard drive? Do you bookmark it or add it to your favorites list? Finding an old site can be very difficult. It might not stand out in the thousands of results from the largest search engines. It might not stand out in a long list of bookmarks or favorites. And if you are using a different machine or a different browser, it may be completely inaccessible to you. The more you use the web, the more this is a problem for you. Everyone suffers with this.

Furl.net is a web site that solves this compelling personal information management problem for you. By bookmarking any site you find of interest on Furl, you can easily annotate, find it later, refer to it, and share it with others. All on a system with practically unlimited storage, accessible to you from anywhere on the web, at no cost to you.

Furl provides so many features it can be hard to take it all in. There are many other "social bookmarking" web sites out there, also - how can you compare them to find the right one for you? What follows is a list of Furl's features to help you see the big picture of all the things you can do with Furl. We believe you'll find that Furl solves your problems easily and simply, and that you'll love using it as much as we do.

-- The Furl Team

Saving

• Archived copy (with Refresh) - With Furl, you can save a copy of a web page and it is archived for you. This means that you can access that page and read it any time you need to, even if the web site is down, or the page has changed on the original web site, or even if the page is no longer accessible for free. In those cases where the web page has changed and you would rather have the new content, you can refresh the archived copy at will.
  
  
• Topics - When you save a web page, you can assign one or more topics to it. These topics help you organize your saved items and more easily find them later. On some other web sites, these are called "tags". The phenomenon of "tagging" has swept the web lately and many sites are now doing this: allowing the users of the site to tag the items on it for easier organization and finding.
  
  
• Keywords - When you save a web page, you can also assign one or more keywords to it. These keywords aid you in finding the page later, but unlike Topics (or "tags") are not as obtrusive. Basically, the keywords you assign are search hints.
  
  
• Comments - You can also save your own comments on the page. This is useful to remind yourself about the item, or to communicate to others your thoughts about it, or even as a forum to write your own commentary or response to it.
  
  
• Clippings - When you save an item, you can also save a clipping with it, that is, a quoted portion of the page that is separately displayed and can be used for summarizing the page or identifying the most important part of it.
  
  
• Ratings - You can apply a rating of 1 (Bad) to 5 (Excellent) to items that you save.
  
  
• Link Validation - When you save an item, if Furl is unable to save a copy (such as, for example, when the URL is not valid or reachable), Furl lets you know of the error.
  
  
• Mark as read/unread - You can mark your save items as read or unread, and you can configure whether Furl treats your saved items by default as read or unread.
  
  
• Bulk actions - Actions can be performed on your saved items in bulk by selecting multiple items and choosing an action (such as delete, or email, for example).
  
  

Searching

• Personal full-text index - Saving the page makes it easy for you to come back to it because Furl builds a full-text index of all your saved pages. Now you can search your own personal web search engine and easily find a page again. No more scrolling through long lists of bookmarks!
  
  
• All saved URLs - Not only can you search your own archive, you can also search an index of all members' publicly saved URLs. This "Furl Search" gives surprisingly good results; it's the product of the collective intelligence of all of the hundreds of thousands of Furl members like you.
  
  
• View by Topic - You can specify one of your Topics when you search on Furl, which will limit your results to items from your archive that you have tagged with that Topic. This is another way to narrow and refine your searches.
  
  
• Configurability - By default, searches on Furl will display to you any matches in your archive, followed by the results from Furl Search. If you'd like to see something different, in your personal settings on the Furl site you can configure your search results to blend any custom combination of these two sources.
  
  

Discovery

• Recommended links - Based on your activity on the site, Furl will recommend other links and topics to you. The recommended links are in order of likelihood to be of interest to you, and they are color-coded to indicate how popular they have been with other Furl members. As you continue to use Furl, your recommendations improve. You can remove items from the list that are not in fact interesting to you, and that also improves the quality of your recommendations. Recommended topics are a good place to browse to look for and find interesting new web pages you didn't know about before.
  
  
• Other members who saved this - Furl lets you know other members who have publicly saved an item you are looking at. It can be interesting to see how many there are and what they had to say about the item. Also, browsing these others members' publicly saved items may reveal new web pages of interest.
  
  
• People who saved this also saved these - Not only can you see the other members who saved an item, you can also see a short list of other sites that were also saved by these members.
  
  
• Furlmates - In addition to recommending links and topics to you in various ways, Furl also tells you about your "furlmates", that is, other Furl members who have similar patterns of saving to yours, ordered by degree of similarity. These furlmates' public archives are particularly good places to browse and discover new web pages of interest.
  
  
• Most recent saves (and By Topic) - Furl displays the list of most recent saves as they happen on the main page. You can also review a longer list on a dedicated page on the site, which includes the hot topics among these latest saves, as well. In both cases, you can specify a topic and just see the most recent items saved that have been tagged with that topic. This is a great way to stay abreast of a particular subject area.
  
  
• Most popular items today (and By Topic) - Furl also displays on the main page the list of most popular items based on members' saving activity today. A longer list is also available on a separate page, including a list of hot topics associated with these items. The most popular lists can also be limited to a single topic. The most popular lists are a great way to find out what's new and big on the web.
  
  

Sharing

• Email and Save - When you save an item, you have the option of also emailing a link to one or more addresses of your choosing. You can even choose to only email the link and not save the item in your archive.
  
  
• Subscribe to headlines - Furl allows you to subscribe to another member's public saves. Perhaps you have a friend, colleague, or family member that saves links that are often interesting to you. Perhaps you've run across another Furl member through recommendations or "furlmates", and even though you don't know them, their saved links are particularly interesting. All of these members you have subscribed to are presented to you in a list of headlines that are updated as the saves happen. Every time you use the site, new and interesting headlines may be waiting for you. Or, if you prefer to receive headlines by email, that is also an option. Some people prefer to receive a daily summary email with their new headlines in it. You can also limit which links saved by another member can show up in your headlines - by topic, or by minimum rating. As a courtesy, when someone subscribes to your saves, you are notified by the Furl system, and you can also prevent them from subscribing to your items if you prefer. It's all in your control.
  
  
• Comment - When viewing another Furl member's "item" or "public archive" pages, there are "comment" links that allow you to compose a comment back to the original member about that item. This comment is then emailed by the Furl system to that member, without ever revealing either member's email address.
  
  
• Searchability - The URLs of the items you publicly save are also crawled and indexed by the Furl Search system. This search engine provides surprisingly good results, because it is based on the best and most interesting of the web, as seen by Furl members. This is yet another way that, by using Furl to solve your own personal information management issues, you are also sharing with a larger community and making a broader service better for everyone.
  
  

Privacy

• By item - You can designate an individual saved item as "private". This item is only then visible to you and is only ever used in the Furl system for your own private purposes.
  
  
• By topic - You can also designate one of your topics to be private. This topic is only visible to you and the items you save in it are only visible to you.
  
  
• Default - When you first join, the default for newly saved items is "public" and you can easily at save time mark an item to be "private". If you prefer, you can go into your individual settings on the site and change your default to "private", and then the items you save after that will be marked "private" unless you want them to be shared and mark them "public".
  
  
• Search spiders - If you prefer that your public Furl archive not show up in search engines, you can specify in your preferences not to allow spiders to view your items.
  
  

Syndication

• RSS for each public archive (and By Topic) - RSS feeds of your public archive items are available, which can also be limited to a specific topic. RSS is a syndication protocol that allows people to read a feed of items rather than a web page. This feed can be followed, new items at a time, using RSS reader software or RSS aggregator web sites. RSS in particular and syndication in general are fast becoming the optimum way for people to read and keep up with large amounts of new data on the web.
  
  
• RSS for most recent (and By Topic) - Similarly, the "latest headlines" list of most recently saved items from the front page of the Furl site are also available via RSS, and can also be limited to a specific topic.
  
  
• RSS for most popular (and By Topic) - You can also access the most popular items today through an RSS feed, or limit that to a specific topic.
  
  
• Link list for web page with customizable layout - You can easily incorporate your latest public saves into your blog or other web page using easy cut-and-paste javascript. You can also easily customize the layout.
  
  

Interoperability

• Import from Internet Explorer - You can easily import your Internet Explorer favorites into Furl. Each favorite site then becomes an item in your Furl archive. This makes it easy to get started and ensure you'll never lose track of those favorite sites, no matter which computer or browser you're using.
  
  
• Import from Mozilla/Netscape/Firefox - Similarly, you can also import your bookmarks from the Mozilla, Netscape, and Firefox browsers.
  
  
• Import from del.icio.us - If you have bookmarks in the del.icio.us social bookmarking service, you can export them and then import them into Furl. This will enable you to switch to using Furl (where you get all the benefits of archived saves and full-text searching) without losing any of the investment you may have made in bookmarking on the other site.
  
  
• Export to zip archive - Just so you know you are not locked in to Furl, you can export your full Furl archive, including saved pages, into a "zip" archive, downloaded to your computer. Our goal is to make Furl a useful and valuable part of your life on the web, and we hope you use it for that reason.

  Also, Furl's data and servers are professionally managed and backed up. However, if you have any doubt about the reliability of that storage, you are also welcome to export and download your archive for that reason, too.
  

• Export to XML - Similarly, you can export your Furl sites to an XML format for whatever additional processing you might want to do, if you're the sort of person who wants to do something with XML.
  
  
• Export to IE favorites - You can export to Internet Explorer Favorites format, for further processing, or for importing into IE, if you like.
  
  
• Export to Mozilla/Firefox bookmarks - You can also export to bookmarks format for the Mozilla, Netscape or Firefox browsers.
  
  
• Export to MLA, APA, Chicago, CBE, BibTeX, RIS/EndNote citations - You can generate a citation list in any of a number of academic formats, to assist with construction of an academic paper or web site. Aiding in research and education is a very popular and effective use of Furl.
  
  
• Export by topic or subset - For any of the export options, you can select a subset of your archive, or you can select a specific topic, and only those items will be exported, in the format of your choice.
  
  

Tools

• Internet Explorer toolbar - You can install a Furl toolbar into your Internet Explorer web browser for the richest Furl experience. With the toolbar you can easily save pages, access the most popular parts of the Furl.net web site, submit feedback, and search in Furl or ten other sources, and the toolbar also contains helpful highlighting and pop-up blocking tools.
  
  
• Mozilla/Firefox toolbar - In your Mozilla or Firefox web browser, you can also install a Furl toolbar with most of the same functions as the IE toolbar: you easily save pages and access the most popular parts of the Furl.net web site using this toolbar. This is the easiest way for most people to use Furl.
  
  
• Firefox search extension - The Firefox toolbar does not include furl search functionality, but there is also available a search extension for Firefox that will add furl search to your Firefox search options. Simply go to: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1781&application=firefox and download Furl Tools 0.6.
  
  
• Bookmarklet for save (with pop-up and without) - Some people prefer not to install a toolbar, and instead use a "bookmarklet" to save items to Furl. These bookmarklets are very easy to download and install into your browser - all they are is a bookmark (most useful as a button, but can also be in your browser's bookmarks or favorites list) that contains the javascript necessary to initiate a Furl save. Versions of the bookmarklet are available, both with a separate pop-up window (favored by most people so that the original site page is not affected) and without. There is also a version of the bookmarklet for fast saving of a page with URL and TITLE elements from the original page only (assuming you will go back and edit it if you want to save more information).
  
  

Ease of Use

• Web application - As a web-based application, Furl should be accessible from any location and most any browser that handles standard web and javascript pages. Access to your bookmarks is no longer limited to the machine or browser you happened to be using at the time, allowing you to be truly mobile on the Internet.
  
  
• Beats browser bookmarks navigation - With the easy web interface and using the powerful tagging technology to categorize your items with multiple categories or even subcategories, you can use Furl to manage much larger and more complex data sets than your browser's bookmarks or favorites navigation can handle, with much less effort on your part. Rather than manually organizing (or more likely, only erratically organizing) your bookmarks with folders and subfolders, let your topics do the work for you and use the search interface to easily and precisely find and re-find the web pages that you need.
  
  
• Topic creation - To help new members get started, there is a pre-created list of topics available from the start in every account. For some members, that is all they ever need. This provides a common baseline; certain topics are more likely to have general interest links, as a result, and are great for searching or subscribing to (whether by headlines or by RSS) when wanting to browse and discover new and interesting web pages. For other members, additional topics are easily created at will. For members who make the most extensive use of topics, the primary interface becomes the "new topics" box, where you can simply type in a list of topics, separated by semicolon (';'), and if any in the list are new they are created for you automatically.
  
  
• News/blog - On the front page of the Furl.net site, there is a most recent Furl News item. These are also available via RSS feed. The full Furl News blog of past items is also available.
  
  
• Easy URLs - Nothing's more annoying than trying to use a web site with those big long URLs full of gobbledygook. Furl.net URLs are straightforward to read and write, and the most commonly used ones are easy to remember. A user's public archive is accessible at http://furl.net/members/USERID, for example. Similarly, that user's RSS feed is at http://furl.net/members/USERID/rss.xml.