Dictionary Definition
furl v : form into a cylinder by rolling; "Roll
up the cloth" [syn: roll up]
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Pronunciation
- Rhymes: -ɜː(r)l
Translations
To lower, roll up and secure something
- Finnish: laittaa kokoon
Extensive Definition
Furl (from File Uniform Resource Locators) is a
free social
bookmarking website that allows members to store searchable
copies of webpages and
share them with others. Every member receives 5 gigabytes of storage space. The
site was founded by Mike Giles in 2003 and purchased by LookSmart in
2004.
Features
Furl enables members to bookmark, annotate, and share web pages. Topics are used to categorize saved sites, similar to the tagging feature of other social websites. Additionally, a user may write comments, save clippings, assign each bookmark a rating and keywords (which are given greater weight while searching), and have an option of private or public storage for each topic or item archived.Considered one of its main features, Furl also
privately archives a complete copy of the html of each page that a
user bookmarks, making it accessible even if the original content
is modified or removed, an antidote for link rot. This
also allows full text searches to be made within the archive.
However, as highlighted under limitations below, images that are
embedded using links are not archived with user's copy of the html
page, so images may disappear over time. To avoid claims of
copyright violations, this archived copy is visible only to the
member who bookmarked the page. Other users are directed to the
publisher's site, where the content can be viewed depending on
membership requirements and privacy settings.
Users may see lists of other users who have
furled a URL, and read their comments (if made public) to find
users who share interests, supporting folksonomy. A dynamic
recommendation list is automatically generated for each user based
on the sites already saved by him or her and other users with
similar interests. Lists of the most popular items for today, this
week, and this month (and by topic) are also available. It's
possible to subscribe to a user's archive (or to a set of topics in
a user's archive) to get daily email notifications whenever new
items are filed.
Furl allows bookmarks to be imported from (and
exported to) Internet
Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, and
del.icio.us;
and also supports exporting of the entire saved archives to
ZIP
formats, and export metadata to XML format. There are
other import/export functions, including various citation formats
(MLA, APA, Chicago, CBE, BibTeX, and RIS/EndNote). Toolbars and
bookmarklets are
available for Internet Explorer and Firefox to quicken the
bookmarking process.
Limitations
Images which are embedded links will not be
archived with the HTML page. For example, when an HTML page is
archived via Furl, the location of the JPG from the HTML content is
saved, thus pulling up that image when the user's personal copy is
loaded; however, if that image no longer exists on the original
server, it is lost and will not display with the user's archived
copy. So, a Furled site with many pictures may end up being just
text.
The search result displays items from the entire
Furl archive, or only from a user's own archive, but the sequence
of these results is automatically ordered. There is no option to
display results by date order, by popularity order, or in any other
particular sequence. It is not obvious how the results are
ordered.
The popularity of Furl has grown, which has
exposed users to performance problems which began in the latter
half of 2006 and persisted into 2007.
Updates
New features were released in early 2007,
including an updated user-interface. On January 30, 2008, Furl
unveiled an updated user interface.
External links
furl in German: Furl