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Furl is a social bookmarking site.

Furl was launched in 2003 as one of the first social bookmarking sites. It is one of many web-based bookmarking applications that allow you to store a list of your favorite sites online. As a facility for storing bookmarks it's pretty good, but it is really a let down on the social bookmarking side. When browsing the sections of most popular links by category, there is little or no organization and most of the lists seemed to have been abused by spammers looking to get their links to the top. In terms of browsing sites by category, you'd have more luck just typing a category into Google and hoping for the best.
Furl does allow you to store your own favorite sites, and goes further than storing just the bookmarked URL, by storing a copy of the web page online, so that you will always be able to refer back to it, even if the internet version of the page changes in the meantime. Each user receives a generous 5 GB of storage room in order to store online versions of many web pages. Unfortunately however, we were unable to test this facility due an inability to register an account at the site. Furl was acquired by Diigo in March 2009. The same month Diigo announced they will close down the service: "The Furl team is very pleased to announce that Furl has become part of Diigo.com. We worked hard to find Furl a home where loyal users like you could continue to benefit from best-of-breed social bookmarking and annotation tools. Hands down, Diigo.com was the winner due to its innovative approach to online research tools and knowledge sharing.

The Diigo team is dedicated to making sure you continue to get top notch features and service. They've got a crack team of technologists who love making research and knowledge sharing as easy and efficient as possible. Exporting your data from Furl to Diigo is super easy.

Just follow this link: http://cp20.com/Tracking/t.c?5g68-3P77-Aku7V2

We feel fortunate to have been able to serve as your social bookmarking site provider and can't thank you enough for your loyal support over the past four years. We'll miss you and we wish you the best as part of the Diigo community."

Furl competes with a number of social bookmarking websites. Where it is let down is in the organizational side of things. While it's good enough for storing your own bookmarks in a remote location, it is really let down when it comes to pooling the shared knowledge and bookmarks of all the users. The site could do with a much better database and category system.

Furl uses a very modern look and feel with bright, engaging colors. Navigation and buttons are clearly marked and text is readably large.

Registration appears at first to be a simple process, but it was anything but that. You must provide a username and password, as well as an e-mail. After doing this, we were told that an "error" of some kind had occurred. So, the registration process had to be repeated, but we were informed that the username had been taken already. Guess by who? Turns out the original registration process had succeeded, so we logged in using the details from our first attempt. Success! But now we were told that we wouldn't be able to start until we had clicked on the activation link the confirmation e-mail that had been sent. The confirmation e-mail never arrived, and when we requested the site to resend it, we were presented with yet another error message. At this point you're better off giving up and trying a rival service.

Furl is a free service, funded by advertising.

We don't recommend Furl as long as it is so difficult to register yourself as a user. The site's connection speed is also less than adequate.

• Social bookmarking site.
• Sluggish performance, frequent error messages.
• Inability to register properly.

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