Category Archives: Reviews

Furl: Help! I Can’t Take It Anymore!

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Update: I just had a good conversation on the phone with the CTO of LookSmart, the parent company of Furl. He was very responsive and interested in this and other feedback. I am excited to see some changes that he says are coming up.

I have used Furl.net as my social bookmarking and archiving service for as long as I’ve known such things existed. But I am fed up. The following is an email I sent to Furl tonight. In the past they’ve responded to about 50% of my emails, but never the ones that address these issues in particular. So we’ll see if they respond. I hope they do. I hope they tell me “we were just about to start doing everything in an awesome new way that reflects the best of what the new web has to offer.” Otherwise I’m going to be exploring my bookmark-exporting options here in a hury. I know I’ve been complaining a lot lately, and I don’t intend to focus on criticisms, but this is important to me.

For more info, see my Furl archives on Social Bookmarking and Tagging.

To: Furl@furl.net
Subject: Help! I Can’t Take It Anymore!

Dear Furl feedback, I have been a vocal advocate for Furl for some
time now. I teach all my web 2.0 consulting clients to use Furl. I
push for the inclusion of Furl in every tag-based attention stream I
find. I post comments to other peoples’ blogs about how great Furl is.
I’ve had Furl in my email sig for the last 6 months. I used to
advocate for Furl almost every day. But I can’t take it anymore.
Where is your blog? Where can I read about what you were thinking
with your recent UI changes? WHY has “Furl news” on your front page
and RSS not been updated for 3 months?

Most importantly, what were you thinking when you changed your UI and
failed to change your awful “topic” option?? You’re a social
bookmarking service – everyone uses tagging now. Why is the default a
single “topic” and why does the drop-down SHRINK when I select
multiple for multiple topics? Have none of you ever looked at
del.icio.us? Or Spurl or anyone else out there? I just broke a
minute ago when I wanted to Furl an AJAX enabled, web-app word
processor (itself a genre that’s becoming cliche.) I wanted to TAG it
word_processor AJAX web_apps but it was such a pain in the ass I had
to write you this email instead. It would have been a breeze, fun
even, with del.icio.us.

I have stayed with you for several reasons, but primarily because of
your cache of each page I Furl. That is wonderful but it’s not worth
it anymore. Del.icio.us is catching up to you in feature set (where’s
the Furl API?).

Please help me out. I want to stay with Furl. I want your service to
be usable to me and the rest of the world. But it feels less so every
day.

Sincerely,
Marshall Kirkpatrick (username:marshallkirkpatrick)

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Check out my new website at http://marshallk.com

Training and consulting in new tools for effective web use.
Research, communication, promotion – for individuals, organizations
and small businesses.
RSS, Search, Blogs, Wikis, Folksonomy, Podcasting and more.

See my bookmarked websites and tools at at
http://furl.net/members/marshallkirkpatrick

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Web Apps That Don’t Seem to Work

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While I do have lots of fun learning how to use new web tools, I also spend a lot of time frustrated with things that don’t work for me. But the beauty of that is that I can spend time learning the hard way, and turn around and tell my readers and clients what I’ve learned without them spending that time. So in such a spirit, I thought I’d write today about some things I’ve found that don’t seem to work.

Now I recognize that starting a new web service is hard, success can be a bandwidth problem and there’s so many factors to take into consideration. So no hard feelings, I just don’t want my clients and friends to have to spend as much time being frustrated with the services discussed below as I did. Maybe they will be improved soon and we’ll all fall in love with them. But for now, here are three new services that I have not been able to make work.

  • Pod-o-Matic a free service that will allow you to record, mix and host up to 250 MB worth of podcasts. Interesting concept for sure. With some minor trouble shooting I was able to record a one minute talk, chose from their 10 preselected intro-outro clips and posted it. Unfortunately: the sound quality was bad, long sections of the file were cut out and it doesn’t appear that you can edit the files. Bummer. Guess I’ll have to stay with the fat-client, desktop-apps for podcasting for now. Particularly Audacity. Also worth looking into is Castblaster.
  • Ning.com says it’s a “playground” you can use to build your own web applications. Powerful idea. Has major login problems that persisted for me after the company blog said they were fixed. You have to get an account and log in to use the applications other people have created (things like a different version of Craig’s List). But you have to have a “Beta developers’ account” in order to develop your own applications, and who knows how long it takes for one of those to arrive. So it’s unusable for me right now at least. That’s a shame, because I’d really like to try and find a way to build a good cross-platform tag search engine like TagCentral.net Update: I have a beta developer invite now, but haven’t had the time to figure out wether the php involved is over my head or not. So the invite took about 24 hours, just so you know.
  • Blinklist a social bookmarking system that I have been unable to use. The site in unclear as to what’s different here from del.icio.us or Furl.net or any other online service. I tried to import my archive from Del.icio.us and got an error mssg, though a company rep emailed me and said he wasn’t having any problems doing it. Once I finally got logged in this morning the site recognized I was using Safari, but neither bookmarklet to tag an item does anything. Yes I’ve got my pop-up blocker turned off, and yes my other javascript bookmarklets are working just fine. The User Interface is pretty, but I can’t use the thing at all. For now I’ll stick with social bookmarking services Furl.net, Spurl.net and Del.icio.us.

I hope this has been useful, perhaps as feedback to said companies, perhaps as a time saver for other users and perhaps as informative regarding the kinds of problems that new web applications sometimes have. In other words, if things don’t work for you it is quite possible that it’s not your fault. Few things work perfectly the first time, and I’m up for figuring out what a lot of problems are and how to solve them, but I think it’s time for me to move on from the above three services and dive back into the incredible stream of Web2.0 developments that just keep coming. Perhaps I’ll see these three again later when I can actually use them.

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