Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

seem like their bookmark rank or 'FurlRank' or whatever would be more susceptible to spamming as it 'scales'... neat idea tho, but alas the devil is in the implementation/algorithm, or lack thereof.

OK, so it looks to me like the Killer Use for this thing is to create a personal vault of all the useful weblog comments one ever posts. I am embarassed to admit that I've had to go fishing back through things I've posted...someplace...to find some text to cut and paste into something else. So Furl seems at least a little bit interesting, but since they don't seem to have a privacy policy yet, I kind of scratched my head and decided not to sign up just yet. But I did bookmark the page.

:-)

More seriously, to the extent that the idea has enough merit and intellectual property to be a going concern, I wonder whether it wouldn't make sense for Google just to buy it out (like they already did with deja.com). Again, I suspect one of the killer applications for this is to self-log your activity on other weblogs, and the kind of person who would worship gmail is exactly the kind of person who would want Furl *with* the auto-Google search.

Gmail and Furl - I can dream!

Interesting. Thanks, Brad. What about copyright?

Question for you folks: Which is better? Having this as a service run from some company's server, or as software running on your machine which provides these same features. There are advantages and disadvantages to each way. I'm a software developer and have been pondering this idea (indexing and archiving the web pages a user reads, along with tools for searching and browsing this data.) Only I prefer the notion of the data remaining under the control of the user. Any thoughts?

Well, for me, I store nothing on anyone else's server (that I know of). Not portolios, not address books and not bookmarks. I don't make it any easier for Ashcroft than I have to.

And how will they pay their bills?

Privacy problems, maybe?

I wonder whether some companies will object to their copyrighted pages being stored. Remember some have objected even to "deep links" (links to other than the entrance page). Some sites have requested their pages not be saved on the Wayback Machine, for example.

Also, places like ebay will be sure to object as auctions that are over will appear current, and e-commerce sites' whose prices go stale...

But all in all a cool idea and tool.

You can run but you can't hide, "me" / "Davlanta". I'm comin to get you skanky ass!

There are about 30 programs that do the same thing furl does and many more that do something similar with slight variation.

I've been reading hypermedia ( http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/courses/hypermedia/schedule3.html )and AI research since 1997 - a lot of these ideas already existed in the 1980s - the basic idea of personalweb exited at least since memex ( http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm ). There are a lot of free search engines out there. Since web pages are essentially text and other file formats (pdf for example) are easily converted in real time you can have what he describes within minutes. I've saved every pdf, every web page I've found interesting for years. The problem that's non trivial is to do something more interesting than stick files into a search engine. Nothing really interesting has come out of it yet - words like metadata and intelligent agents and semantic nets are bandied about, but all the programs I've seen are either useless (doesn't do what you want, or far too much effort irt the payoff) or a pale imitation of the original intent of the software design. It's like setting out to engineer a golem to do daily chores and only figuring out how to design an arm that moves up and down.

But Furl saves the entire web page you've "furled", not just the URL, which prevents link rot, on the one hand, and creates what I'll call a "PersonalWeb," on the other.

Latent copyright issues here ...

But wait...there's more. You can share your PersonalWeb with others

Massive, and not at all illegitimate, copyright issues here. Not if your PersonalWeb page contains any of my intellectual property you bloody well can't. As author of D-Squared Digest and of posts on Crooked Timber, I assert the following moral rights:

1. The right to withdraw previously published material from pubication.

2. The right not to have my published material distributed with attribution to me, in a context of which I do not approve.

I expect Furl to respect these rights; I'd be interested to know whether they've given the question any thought.

DD - about your copy rights...

1. "Withdraw from publication"? You gave away the content for free. It's mine now. I can write in the margins, annotate it all I want, loan itto a friend, and then sell it at a garage sale. If I bought your book, you couldn't later demand that I give it back. I bet Lynne Cheney would like to recall all copies of "Sisters" but she can't. She can't stop snarky bloggers from quoting it on the Web or posting copies of the cover art. She can't even enjoin second-hand bookstores from re-selling it, or order libraries to remove it from the shelves.

2. You said it in public. If you wanted it to be private, you should have said it in private. If I reproduce your public words in another public forum, tough luck for you. That is, as long as I don't tortiously invade your privacy or interfere with your contracts, cast you in a false light, intentionally inflict emotional distress, misappropriate or convert your property for my economic gain, or perpetrate a fraud on another person.

3. Fair Use, Satire, 2 Live Crew and all that. Even if you don't like my context, the Supreme Court says you can't stop me.

I don't think these other rights of content users (formerly known as "the publicke") have somehow been obliterated just because we're using computers.

Glad to see the lively discussion of Furl. Just thought I'd make a comment on a few of the items in discussion.

* Copyright - Just to be clear, the copies of pages that get saved with Furl are not exposed to the public (only to the individual who saved them). Obviously, exposing those to the public (as the Wayback Machine could/would) is an issue. But to date, saving items for personal use (i.e. on your hard drive or Furl's) has been deemed fair use. Certainly this is something we have given a lot of thought to and will continue to monitor.

* Privacy - Indeed, the privacy policy is being drafted by our lawyers. But I can assure you that the result will not be scary. Essentially, your data is yours alone. Furl won't sell what we collect, but might target ads based on what you save (just as Google does when you search and when you use gmail).

Feel free to send us your comments directly if you wish (http://www.furl.net/contact.jsp).

I was working in an airport the other day, and I wished for something exactly like FURL. Thanks for posting this, Brad.

To address the center of dsquared's objection: Your "right to withdraw previously published material from publication" doesn't mean I have to give back the copy you gave me.

And if I have a copy, I can store it wherever I have permission to store things. If it's a book, that means at home _or_ in my rented storage locker. And if it's the web page you made available for free. that means on my hard drive _or_ in my private account on Furl.

In other words, in this instance, it isn't the web visionaries arguing for some radical redefinition of commonsense property rights. It's dsquared.

And by the way, I really wouldn't advise trying to argue that putting a web page up doesn't constitute permission to make a copy to my hard drive. Unless you propose to mandate a complete redesign of how browsers work.

I considered Furl, but I already use Surfsaver from the askSam folks and am currently experimenting with ContentSaver.

Both of these ave the url and associated gifs and other graphic format on my C drive in their original format. This way I can outline these saved urls just the way I outline my ressearch projects.

Plus save the exceptional essays I run accross in their uniquely labeled folder.

Plus I do not have to worry about Furl going bankrupt and losing all my carefully saved articles--a dot.com company going under? What a thought.

Memepool guy Josh Schachter's del.icio.us (yes, that's the URL, which means he reserves thr right to launch services called pern.icio.us and v.icio.us) does shared public bookmarking the same way, but all they store are the links, not the pages. And for him, it's a fun little gadget, not a business plan.

Furl's neat. I like the way I can view and subscribe to lists of what other users have Furled. It's interesting to see what Brad, Max Sawicky and others are reading and bookmarking over the course of a day.

From what I've seen so far, Furl's interface has too much clutter. I have yet to see a post that got "rated" and all the extra metadata, categorization and note fields seem to go largely unused. It doesn't help that the categorization mechanism is clumsy, especially compared to (free, shoestring-budget, costs-the-guy-$45-a-month-to-run) del.icio.us.

Interesting. Given the number of competing standalone and web-based gizmos that do much the same thing, even if Furl does it best at the moment (which I'm not too sure about), it's hard to see why a Google would pay much for it. There's nothing complicated about it, especially for companies that already have in-house technology for large webmail or search-engine-style content stores. A low-volume version of it is something I'd hope a second-year CompSci student could whip up over a weekend, and making a version that scales should be trivial for a Google or Yahoo.

This is still retarded.
I am sure I am not alone in pointing out that I am not interested in making lists of "interesting" web pages, no matter how shiny the wrappers the list items are packaged in. What I am interested in solving is the problem of "I remember seeing something about this a few weeks ago" and having the web page found. What does this mean? It means an "agent" tracking every web page I read and allowing me to limit searches to only those, but ALL of those web pages, including, of course, having a date specifier to say "only pages I read between date A and date B".

And if I have a copy, I can store it wherever I have permission to store things. If it's a book, that means at home _or_ in my rented storage locker. And if it's the web page you made available for free. that means on my hard drive _or_ in my private account on Furl.

Yeh, but you can't publish it to the whole jolly internet via "sharing". That's not a first sale right; it's publishing something without permission.

And "fair use" means fair use, not the right to do what you like with other people's work. To use a favourite example of mine, if I write a jolly tune, I have the right to stop you from giving it some lyrics and turning it into a Nazi marching song.

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