TIU: Spurl

Tools I Use: Spurl.net 1.0 – Free online bookmarks with so much more…

Been using Spurl for a while now. Far from perfect but very useful. To me, it brings together the functionalities of Del.icio.us (and other “social bookmarking” services) with those of the Scrapbook Firefox extension. Like Delicious, it allows you to tag and share bookmarks. Like Scrapbook, it keeps a copy of the bookmarked page.

At this point, I got the habit of spurling just anything that I find interesting on the Web. In some cases, I also blog on the bookmarked item. But I don’t necessarily feel a need to put everything in my “to-blog” list. I don’t even tag my bookmarks.

The upshot of my spurling habits is that anyone who wants to know what I’m reading on the Web can just look at my Spurl RSS feed (or Atom feed). In this case, Spurl serves one of the purposes people are using Twitter and other nanoblogging tools for. Yeah, I know it’s not the same thing at all. But, to me, spurling is the lazyperson’s version of nanoblogging.

Now, once the Flock browser does “spell as you type” and Spurl does del.icio.us syncs, I could just use keystrokes to spurl pages I visit.

Hey! Who do you call “lazy?”

6 thoughts on “TIU: Spurl”

  1. Unfortunately, Spurl is dying. I liked it so much when I found it back in early 2005.

    No development in it took place for a long time, and the long standing issue of not supporting UTF-8 encoded pages was not tackled in anyway.

    I expect its disappearance anytime now, unless its lfe take an unexpected turn.

  2. Ahmad,
    Let’s hope something will accomplish the same goals in the near future. Been using Plum which integrates with Facebook and has a rather nice cataloguing system. We’ll see what comes next.

  3. This sounds just like Netsnippets and Hyperfolio which were great programs that died because the developers stopped developing them.

    The MAF archive format for Firefox may die soon because it hasn’t been updated for years, so it doesn’t work properly with modern webpages.

    At least that Japanese guy is still working on Scrapbook.

  4. Kate: thanks for your comment!
    Haven’t tried Netsnippets or Hyperfolio. Too bad they died.
    Strange that so many bookmarking/archiving systems are dying and that the one true bookmarking system hasn’t arisen, yet. Del.icio.us sounded like it could be the ultimate one, and it did improve recently, but it doesn’t seem to be dominating so much. Google has a number of neat tools which could accomplish similar things but their products aren’t as integrated as we would expect.
    Guess we’ll have to wait for the perfect solution to arise. There clearly is a need!

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