LookSmart Hands Over Social Bookmarking Service Furl to Diigo
Search advertising network LookSmart and Diigo, a popular web annotation and research tool, announced a new partnership today. Under the terms of this partnership, LookSmart will transfer Furl, its struggling social bookmarking service, to Diigo. However, while Diigo announced this as an acquisition of Furl, the reality is that Looksmart is getting an equity position in Diigo in return.
LookSmart Shifts Focus
LookSmart acquired Furl in September 2004. At the time, the company announced that it wanted to leverage the data it gathered about users' online behavior through Furl in order to create better search algorithms for web search. Over time, however LookSmart has withdrawn from improving search and the company sold off its FindArticles search engine to CNET in late 2007. Given that Furl is not part of LookSmart's core business anymore, it only makes sense for the company to offload responsibility for the service. We can't help but wonder if LookSmart actually tried to sell Furl but, given the current economic climate, wasn't able to find a partner that wanted to acquire the service directly.
A Good Fit for Diigo
Diigo looks like a good fit for Furl, as it also provides social bookmarking services at the core of its product. Furl at one point looked like it had a bright future ahead of it, but it never really took off. In February 2008, Furl launched a major redesign of its site, which included interesting new features like cached-copy archiving, export in bibliographic formats, and recommendations. According to Diigo, Furl has about one million users - though, as usual, it is hard to say how many of these are active users.
It is not clear how (or if) Diigo will integrate Furl into its own product, but in the announcement, Diigo stresses that it will release version 4.0 of its service soon. Whether this will already feature some integration of Furl's features remains to be seen. For now, Diigo has released a tool that allows Furl users to easily transfer their bookmarks over to Diigo.
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I find Diigo (http://www.diigo.com/education), the social bookmarking site to be one of, if not THE, best tools on the web for locating and organizing online resources.
Not only is Diigo a resource for teachers to locate amazing (and recommended) resources from other teachers, it is also a means for students to learn critical group and collaboration skills. Our students are rapidly embracing these web-based tools and we need to be able to help them navigate effectively, ethically and efficiently.
I look forward to watching how this partnership unFurls.
Ellen Paxton
Chief Learning Officer
Professional Learning Board
Wow, Diigo is consolidating the social bookmarking space. Congrat to the diigo team.
I become a diigo user due to a recommendation from magnolia, which was shut-down recently due to data loss, and I could not be happier with switch!
I'm glad to see Diigo growing. It provides the best set of info annotation and bookmarking tools and has been responsive to the input of users on its own forums. It's nice to see "good guys" do well in tricky times.
Frederic,
Thanks for the coverage. We would like to warmly welcome all Furl users to the Diigo community!
Diigo has extensive development plan and frequent new updates, so we will be phasing Furl out and migrating Furl users to the diigo community. For more info, pls see http://www.diigo.com/054il
With the short transition timeframe, we plan to do a two-phase releases: first, the V3.5 version (an intermediate phase with moderate improvements) shortly and a major upgrade V4 afterward. V4 will feature substantial overhaul and new innovations. We'll also incorporate necessary Furl's features at the upcoming V4 release.