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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Technorati Tags: Furl, del.icio.us, web2.0, tagging, tags, social_bookmarking, web_apps, complaints