The much loved research tool Furl is being absorbed by Diigo – a social bookmarking tool for serious research.
Like many, over the years I’ve found Furl crucial for research when I’ve needed access to saved versions of pages – not just bookmarks. Unlike delicious, Furl let me save whole pages to its servers rather than just the link. It also came with a heap of other tools that let you network with other users. Out of the blue, however, this week Furl’s one million users were told that diigo has acquired Furl after Furl’s owners – LookSmart – changed focus.
‘We worked hard to find Furl a home where loyal users like you could continue to benefit from best-of-breed social bookmarking and annotation tools,’ Furl said. ‘Hands down, Diigo was the winner due to its innovative approach to online research tools and knowledge sharing.’
Again, Diigo is probably a more reliable and flexible research tool than delicious. You can:
- highlight parts of web pages and archive those section;
- attach ‘sticky’ notes to pages;
- save pages and your notes to Diigo’s servers;
- share saved files to with a project team;
- network with other Diigo users by contacting them directly or watching what they save; and,
- explore by tag.
As I’ve stressed before, if you’re involved in serious research one of the biggest problems with delicious is the fact that web links can become inactive very quickly. If you need reliable access to your source material quickly – you need another solution. I’ve no experience with Diigo so I’ll monitor its service over the next few weeks.
In the meantime, if you’re a Furl user, Diigo has set up an easy way to transfer your archive. More on Diigo soon.
