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 Over time, however LookSmart has withdrawn from improving search and the company sold off its FindArticles search engine to CNET in late 2007.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.

The highlight of the new version is recommendations. The new Diigo offers a number of social networking type features that in-and-of themselves aren't worth a lot to me, but if they can do some number crunching and recommend people and content that I may want to subscribe to - that's gold.

What's the biggest crime committed by Del.icio.us? It's not leveraging the huge amount of data the service holds for some recommendations. Why on earth, in this data-centric era, isn't every social bookmarking service making bookmarking social and smart? If Yahoo! held an Amazon-style contest for recommendation algorithms that could be run against Del.icio.us, they could set up a Yahoo! News style page that was personalized like nobody's business. We'd all come back daily to read Del.icio.us, they could run ads up the wazoo and everyone would be beside themselves with happiness.

Instead we'll have to look to a pre-acquisition startup with neither network effect nor scaling problems. Diigo has potential to change the social bookmarking game just because they are offering recommendations. The recommendations aren't even very good yet because there's very few people using the service and the algorithm appears quite simple. I imported several hundred bookmarks from Ma.gnolia and perhaps Diigo will think deeper thoughts about my history after a few hours. I'm not so sure, though. It's still worth a look because it has so much potential.

You might also like the annotation features, though in all likelihood they will prove more trouble than they are worth unless you're an academic. You can associate an OpenID account with your Diigo account now, too. That's good.

Trust

Checking out Diigo could be pretty pain-free. The service does a good job of importing your bookmarks from elsewhere and allows you to publish simultaneously to your account at Del.ico.us, Ma.gnolia or Simpy. If, that is, you are willing to trust the Diigo people with the password to your usual social bookmarking account. Doesn't Ma.gnolia at least have oAuth support so I don't have to do that? Discussion about user authentication protocols as part of data portability seem common enough by now that it's outright offensive to be asked for your password to another web app. If you can deal with that, then there's no reason not to give Diigo a try.

Check out Diigo for yourself, it could be just what you're looking for. It's getting closer to something I can imagine using regularly and really appreciating - but it's not there yet. I'll keep an eye on the recommendations feature because if that ends up working out well, it would be reason enough to switch to Diigo.