It was getting tedious, even with my own multi-site bookmarklet tool, to load web sites I have scanned into both furl and del.icio.us— especially as Firefox seemed to 60% of the time lose track of the Furl content. It’s nothing wrong with Furl, I like the service, and it has most of the hooks I need… I just am trying to shave some minutes and keystrokes form my life.
I’ve been more intrigued and using more often del.icio.us, so I decided to make it my primary dumping ground. There are more interesting ways people are writing applications that tap into it. My concern was that I would lose all the sites I had tracked earlier in Furl. But have no fear, Underdog, the Internet is here.
Some quick googling got me to Anything Else’s (and read aloud the URL 😉 Furl to Delicious tools. Skipping the pythion stuff (I am not nerdy enough), I downloaded the Windows executable, and ran it on my Dell. From a stark but functional command line, it prompted me for my account names and passwords, and began to chug away…
It moved more than 260 sites from Furl, and used my Furl categories as del.icio.us ones.. and it created its own tag of furl2delicous that shows all the sites that made the move. Clever programmer, that means he can use the wider tag to see all the ones that anyone has moved with his tool.
I love it when the tools can move data to and from these systems– that is some of the simple stuff that I suppose Derek Morrison is after. How deftly can you move your course from one locked down megabuck Course Management System to another? Yes, of course the data is more complex..but than again it has all that IMS meta data that has been honed for the last 15 year.
But I stray from my point on a tangent, and I am already lat to head home for dinner.
I’m just a happy single site bookmarker… for now.
You may want to consider Simpy, as you can easily sync your delicious links with it through Simpy’s Third Party support. Delicious sucks for searching, but Simpy supports full-text searching, boolean queries, phrases, etc.
Alan–
The thing I liked about Furl is that it maintains a cached version of each furled/bookmarked page. I find that useful for searching.
However, Furl is pretty weak on the tagging/taxonomy front, especially from the UI perspective.
I’ve since switched to a competing service, Spurl (http://www.spurl.com). Like Furl, Spurl caches and enables searching of archived pages. However, Spurl also has seamless Del.icio.us integration, so when I enter something in Spurl, the link, description, and tags are piped through to Del.icio.us automatically.
I hardly ever access the Spurl interface, UNLESS I need to do a full-text search on the pages I’ve tagged.
In effect, Spurl has become my Del.icio.us entry & full-text search client.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with Spurl, Greg… I’ve been there, created an account when I was checking out the different toolbar scripts. I’m giving it a whilr now to connect it to my del.icio.us account.
However, i’ve really been addicted to the sparking AJAXed tagging interface of del.icio.us for suggesting tags and tag completion.