del icio us to furl net

I’ve been using del.icio.us for about 2 years now (the first link I posted, the XSL-FO 1.1 recommendation, was December 29th 2005). And I’ve been very happy about it. I use it to share all of my bookmarks (with friends as well as with myself across PCs), tag them and see my friends’ bookmarks.

One handy feature I like a lot is using an RSS feed for a specific tag as a live bookmark in Firefox. For example, I have a tag ‘dailypersonal’ for stuff I want to look at daily, and with the live bookmark, I can open all of my daily links each in its separate tab, just with a single click.

Since a couple of months, my Firefox seems to freeze from time to time. Recently, I’ve found out it freezes after I bookmarked a link to del.icio.us using their firefox plugin. More specifically, it freezes when I hit enter after specifying the tag names, instead of clicking on the ‘save’ button. It took me a while for figuring that out, because Firefox didn’t instantly freeze, only a couple of minutes later.

Anyway, I considered to switch to furl now. I didn’t really study it, or made an in-depth comparison. At a first glance, it looked better, nicer and more user friendly for non-techies (so perhaps I can try to persuade my parents to use it?). I love the fact that it archives a copy of the page when you bookmark it, and allows you to search this archive. And last but not least, I can spell ‘furl’ without to much trouble, as opposed to ‘del.icio.us’. It seemed like the grass on the other side, I expected it to be greener. I’ve imported my bookmarks from del.icio.us and that seemed to work.

However, when I tried to retrieve RSS feeds from my furl bookmarks, the RSS didn’t contain any bookmarks. It was empty. I sent an email asking to look at it, and got an immediate response: ‘please provide your username so I can take a look at the problem’. It seemed they really were going to look at it! Unfortunately, after I sent my username three days ago, I didn’t receive any responses anymore.

And three days without my handy Live Bookmarks is too long. So, I will stick with del.icio.us for a while. It looks pretty basic, but at least it works!