/robert/blog

I started with del.icio.us few months ago - I like it. It's simple, fast, no-brainer to use and does not try to be cute.

Thru del.icio.us I found FURL. It gives user more options on documenting, organizing, searching and sharing his bookmarks.
Coolest thing : when you bookmark with this tool, it also saves a COPY of the page like a "snapshot" on its server(s). So the text content is archived as it appears at that moment.(binary content is still linked from the original sites).

I like FURL's intuitive user interface, documentation is good. Too bad it does not host a discussion forum.
So this page-archiving feature is a solution to the nefarious link rot.
But !....
being US-based it apparently had to bow to copyright issues & legal concerns so archived copies are only visible to the account owner. No permalinks. No sharing there. Sorry.
I found that out to my disappointment, then I read about the legal issues.
That sucks but I'm pretty sure is not a concern at all to 99% of the users.

Then I found SPURL, very similar to FURL. The UI looks rather "busy" and documentation/help is so-so. But boy they really did a good job with the page-archiving part. Every stored copy has a permalink with a sensible URL
(like http://cache.spurl.net/?url=http://www.ibm.com - encoded of course) and dispalys timestamp the copy was taken and a clear message:
"The page is shown as it was at the time it was stored and has not been modified in any way."
Now I like that.