Move Over Memigo - You Have Competition

Thanks to Gary and Co at Teledyn I came across this posting on weblogg from Will Richardson who has been fooling about with Furl.

Now I'm a sucker for anything that tries to make more simple organising and annotating the chaos that is the net. And these guys have come up with a very cool tool that does a number of excellent things, in just the way I want.

Furl lets me set up an account and add URL's to it with the click of a bookmarklet (Yay for Opera 7.2 it supports them at last). Memigo does the same, but Furl has taken it the next step. Memigo just offers me the URL and Page Title, but Furl gives me a fleet of options.

I happened to be checking the CNET story on MSN's new multilingual search options so I selected some text and clicked the bookmarklet to launch the Furl dialogue and this is what turned up. Click the image to get a new window with the full sized version.

What a brilliant design.

• It automatically loads the page title, which I can edit if I like
  
• loads the URL
  
• gives me a dropdown list for rating the content (Radio buttons would be easier)
  
• another to assign it to a category
  
• plus an option to create a fresh category on the spot
  
• a field for comments
  
• an option for private (logged in or shared list) vew only
  
• keywords
  
• automatically pastes in the selected text
  
• offers me save (to my list), email (second form for addresses) or save and email
  
• closes itself once I have done
  

To top it off there are options for people to sign up for a daily digest of my browsing via email or an RSS feed of the list which you can drop into your aggregator or add to your website or blog and automatically update.

In the words of Billy Connolly YYYYYEEEEESSSSS!!!!! I did some work 18 months ago for a client and made some recommendations for tools to add resources to their database. This is what I said then.

Investigate an “Add Resources” plugin, or encourage members to add a link to their personal toolbars which is permanently available in the browser. (Bookmarklet) This tool would be able to

• Launch a popup from any page
• Automatically pick up the URL (not editable)
• Automatically insert the page title (editable)
• Include a comment field
• Include the rating options.
• Enable 2 click contributions (one to launch the popup, one to rate the resource and close the window)

Furl has been reading my mail, and gone a couple better. Take a 10.

Comments

[Costas]

Well, I am glad you like Furl (I do too), but it's not quite a Memigo competitor, now is it? I've thought of expanding Memigo to a full-blown bookmark manager that would be context-aware (Furl and its kin isn't), but I don't see the ROI (even in non-$ terms, just plain traffic and growth of the service) in doing that.

EM
ROI is a good point, what interests me about Furl is that it enables, essentially, a mimi blog to be generated with ease and the content to be cached, categorised and rated by multiple users.

I can see a possible market for content providers to get some aggregated feedback on what users make of their content, both ratings and categories to which it is assigned.

There's nothing then to stop Furl from enabling users to receive services along the lines of Memigo's "these people also rate this stuff highly" and "if you like this you might like that or be interested in this person". Clip on a messaging tool and you have the foundation for a social tool based on shared appreiatiopn of content.

Set up RSS feeds based on categories, enable multiple users to post to the list and there is a fast and dirty tool for sharing closely related material among a working group.

I can also see some value, (and some possible copyright hassles) in the cached copies. Give me the ability to select a category, enter a date range or other criteria (like author or publication) and download a zipped file with all the selected content and I'll be more than interested for a couple of knoweldeg worker projects I'm working on.

[Richard]

Spectacular Furl for sure but with my opera 7.5 the 'furl it' bookmarklets raise the form with all empty fields. Can anyone clip me round the ears with the solution please.