Mike Giles, previously of Vitria.com, has created a site/utility that takes bookmarking websites to a whole new level, the level of personalization. As the search industry and the web as a whole moves towards personalization, Furl is offering a web application that has the idea of a personalized web at heart.
Simply put, Furl offers members (free signup) a place to store any content found on the Internet and the knowledge that you can find it again at any time. A description from Furl’s website sums this idea up nicely: “Furl is a digital filing cabinet that lets you search every document.”
Not only can information be stored on Furl, it can also be shared with whomever the user sees fit. The idea is to give users their own personalized web. This web will contain sites and documents that the user indicates, and all of this stored information is searchable.
John Battelle offers some excellent thoughts on the potential that personalization Furl gives:
“After all, it’s just a web page-saving application. Right? Well, yes and no. Furl does a good job of helping you manage your web browsing. It adds several features that others don’ t have – full text search on your saved pages, for example. But Furl saves the entire web page you’ve ‘furled’, not just the URL, which prevents link rot, on the one hand, and creates what I’ll call a ‘PersonalWeb,’ on the other.”
murdok | Breaking eBusiness News
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