roxomaticFurl, Spurl or del.icio.us?
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Generally, social bookmarks are understood as bookmarks that allow a public administration. Furl, Spurl and del.icio.us are three well-known services, actually free of cost for the member. What are they able to do?
Save pages
Furl and Spurl save a copy of the complete page of a marked adress. At Furl, this copy can only be accessed by the member itself, Spurl allows the copy to be pulic to other users, and it makes a difference between copies made by several users at a different time. Spurl has a limit of 250 KB – a limit you don’t reach very often (an example is this page here). The ability to save pages makes sense e.g. for newspaper articles that may disappear after some weeks or that may become part of an archive you have to pay. Only del.icio.us does not save any copies.
Added to this, Spurl offers the opportunity to have a look at pages offering related content or entries for the same domain, made by other members.
Community and Privacy
If I want to see adresses othe people mark, Furl, Spurl and del.icio.us let us have a look at the last or the most popular bookmarks (in every case, these lists can be seen on the homepage or just a link from there). del.icio.us has a simply great URI-structure: Having a look at http://del.icio.us/tag/firefox will show you the entries with the attributed keyword (“tag”) firefox that have been contributed by all users.
Also, Furl and del.icio.us show me the public archives of other members, and you can subscribe to their links alternatively using the RSS-feed or adding them to the section My Headlines (_Furl_) or inbox (_del.icio.us_). With Spurl, you can do this only when knowing the specific RSS-adress and subscribing with an external RSS-Reader. Spurl (just as the two other services) shows you how many members marked the page X, but in this case I do not see who did so. del.icio.us allows to exclude the links of specific members (“antisocial”). Furl and Spurl have so-called tell a friend-sripts to inform other people about interesting links. With Furl, you can set the whole archive as private – or, alternatively, it can hide at least (as Spurl does, too) single entries. In del.icio.us, all entries are public.
RSS feeds
Of course, the three services offer RSS feeds you can subscribe to easily. As subscriber, you can limit these feeds to the topics or tags you want.
Spurl makes a RSS-URL look like this: http://www.spurl.net/myspurls/quick_links.php?p=rss&l=latest&userid=6724&language=&filter==. Really, this is not too nice, and you are unable to remember it. With Furl, it seems to be much easier (http://www.furl.net/members/Kossatsch/rss.xml), but with del.icio.us it is absolutely easy to remember and to construct (http://del.icio.us/rss/Kossatsch).
Furl and Spurl allow both to include the feeds in HTML or PHP pages with javascript, in the case of Furl unfortunately only as HTML table. Using del.icio.us, this option has to be made by hand – just as it is the case in this blog.
Social bookmarks and browser
For Mozilla and Firefox, there have been programmed extensions for Furl and for del.icio.us. The Firefox extension Foxylicious can be strongly recommended, especially for teamwork. With Foxylicious, your Firefox browser integrates your del.icio.us-bookmarks, if you want even with a daily update. For Mac users, there is a tool named cocoal.icio.us. Spurl does not offer so much, but besides the bookmarklet there is a sidebar.
With other browsers, you can use bookmarklets.
Interactions
All services let you import and export bookmarks. In most cases the Mozilla bookmark format is used, Furl is able to export e.g. in BibTeX and lets you download all your saved documents as zip file. del.icio.us makes you search to find tutorials how to import (with Python) or how to export (also here). Internal communication is supported by Spurl and del.icio.us: the first is able to send links to a del.icio.us account and to import your del.icio.us bookmarks (this option can be skipped for any link).
What more?
The main problem with these services is that soon they will probably cost. In the case of Spurl this does not seem to be the case – Hjalmar Gislason indicated this interview to me. How many money are you willing to spend for social bookmarks?
Another problem is the amount of options offered; many KBs have to be loaded and this problems of reachablility and of speed in the cases of Spurl and Furl. del.icio.us has a simple interface, but it is quick and it has a logical and simple URL structure.
The administration of entries with Furl seems easier to me than with Spurl; but the possibilities of half-public copies and the interaction with del.icio.us are aspects that made me change from Furl to a combination of Spurl and del.icio.us.
Test it yourself
Besides the options mentioned here there are, of course, many other things. Maybe you should test it yourself:
PS: A table with a summary will be found in this PDF document. And please excuse my bad English.
PPS: You wil find an update here (here as PDF)
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Hello – I would love to see Simpy compared to Delicious, Furl, and Spurl, side by side. Is this something you could add?
Coming sooner or later…
Just want to add another request for Simpy to be compared in your list. Thank you very much for the chart you made too!
Ditto for Simpy. If you could also add a row on your chart indicating the subjective responsiveness/speed of each site that would be great … the biggest problem I find with ALL online bookmarks sites is that they are much slower to use (especially to add new links) than any given browser’s native bookmark tool.
In your comparison chart, what is the difference between categories and tags?
Also do you know if other bookmark managers have a keyword prefix like Furl?
When you bookmark an item in Furl, you can add a keyword. Later to search this keyword you need to use the prefix or command, as shown below
eg. Keyword:cats
This keyword attribute is different to a folder/tag as it is not social: can’t be shared and has no RSS feed.
So in Furl, you can use a folder/tag as a label, and you can use the keyword prefix command as another type of label.
Although Furl doesn’t allow you to view an index or list of all your keywords.
On the chart I see it mentions that Blogmarks can post a link to a blog.
Is this similar to what reblog does?
It also mentions this feature in del.icio.us, but I can’t find it.
Categories – in general – are a rough description of the field your bookmarks belongs to. Spurl allows to set more than one category. A tag is a kind of keyword, and i most cases you will use more than one tag to describe your link.
I still did not test reblog, but AFAIK it creates its own interface and its own RSS feed. And to know more about the post-to-blog, look here.
After spending many days poring over your chart I finally settled on a combined use of Spurl and del.icio.us, which I’ve used to integrate the job of saving bookmarks into my blogging process. I’ve documented my method for integrating bookmarkign and blogging at http://alexandrasamuel.com/blog/20050522/make-blogging-part-of-your-workflow/
And I also turned my quest for better bookmarking into a story on tagging for the Toronto Star: http://alexandrasamuel.com/blog/20050516/today-in-the-toronto-star-tagging/
Thanks for helping me start down the social bookmarking road!
I think you’ve underestimated spurl a little.
You can sync your spurls with firefox using the bookmarks manager and it will also sync with del.icio.us so you can get the best of both worlds.
If you “publish your spurls”, then you can have a nice web address, available to all.
http://www.spurl.net/discover/user//
And you can make rss feeds from that page or from or you can make a stream through stream.spurl.net (with group contributions).
This would be very useful for a student like me. Before I was just using Delicious, but this time Ive tried to sync it with others.