What a great list. I will be coming back to it again later It shows the top three Web 2.0 applications in 41 categories for the year 2007, as voted by ‘…a team of 25 of the most knowledgeable, well-respected experts in the field…’. Categories include Blog Guides, Books, Collaborative Writing and Word Processing, Mashups, Mapping, and Social Networking. Because 23 things only introduces a small number of Web 2.0 tools and there are so many out there, this thing asked participants to explore the list, or pick a particular category, to find their own tool to explore. I chose the Bookmarking category and Furl, because this is a tool I would have had to explore eventually, to prepare me to write the post on social bookmarking and tagging for the 21 lunges program. So what a good opportunity.
Furl has the same premise as del.icio.us: it allows a person to create a listing of bookmarks (links) to favourite/useful websites, tag them with useful keywords so they can be grouped together in categories, or easily searched, descriptions can be added to know why a link is useful, and bookmarks can be shared with others – the social aspect.
I can also see what links have become recently popular, based on what others on the sites are doing, can search within both to find other links that interest me, and can add buttons to my browser to easily add links I find while surfing the net.
I really like the idea of bookmarking tools, because all the links I use regularly, or just like, are in one place and can be accessed wherever I happen to be regardless of the computer or browser I use. And that you can also explore other people’s bookmarks around you is a great thing. I’ve written in my post on del.icio.us how bookmarking could be useful for libraries and academia generally.
Del.icio.us is easy to use and navigate, because of its simplistic colour scheme, it has a very clean look, it is easy to add, delete and share links, and help is identifiable. Furl is not so easy or intuitive. Furl is not cluttered and the colour scheme is fine, it looks like a good page when a person logs in, but it took me a while to realise that the four links across the top, ‘Welcome’, ‘Tools’, ‘Save’ and ‘Explore’, are expandable menus (it didn’t help that I have been having trouble with my computer either). So, I was going to the bottom of the page instead to use (some) of the options. There is no ‘Help’ at the top, this is also at the bottom, and I felt the ‘FAQ’s’ weren’t as detailed as I would have liked, and I thought the ‘How People Use Furl’ link would be Help-based, but instead it provides quotes from people on ways they use it. Also, I wanted to edit some of my links after initially including them. Nothing explained how to do this that I could see and only after a bit of exploring did I realise that the “orange f” next to each link added is expandable too (you have to get the mouse just right), with edit, delete, and other options displayed. I also don’t understand the ‘Latest Headlines option’: a search on this seems to return news-related links based on the keywords used. But I’m not sure, as it isn’t explained.
I do like the fact that Furl saves a copy of the page you bookmark, so if it ever goes down, the cache is still available, and that you can choose from predefined tags, as well as include your own free-text keywords for searching. Furl also allows full-text searching (finding all instances of words searched in the results returned). The template used to populate information about a new link is good. It would take some getting used to, I don’t think it Furl is “bad”, but of both bookmarking tools explored (thus far), del.icio.us is superior.
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