URI: www.furl.net
Popularity: Alexa - 4th, PR 8
Special Feature: Saves entire copy of page

Why should I care:
Furl’s main attraction to web surfers is its ability to save a copy of the page they are bookmarking for later viewing. To be clear, Furl saves a local copy of your page for the bookmarkee (the user) — not just the URL. Furl also gives you plenty of ways to show your bookmarks via some clever javascript. Maybe I’m cynical, but besides the big selling point of offering to store a copy of the page locally, Furl doesn’t offer any more than the standard social bookmarking site (tags, links, popular page, whats new, yadda yadda). I guess it’s good that its not missing those things at any rate.

For the publisher, Furl also offers the ability to display your Furl entries, in a variety of ways.

What you didn’t know:

A common misperception of Furl is that it allows people to share copyrighted work. Fortunately for everyone, that is not the case. When you save an item with Furl, you save a copy of the document, but that copy is only visible to you. When other users view an item in your public archive, they are directed to the publishers site. If that site requires membership, they must sign up to see the content.

Summary:

Furl is a popular website — but its no digg or del.icio.us so you won’t be tanked by your bandwidth bill should you make the front page. The main (and perhaps only) selling feature of Furl is that your users can save what you write locally on Furl servers. Other bookmarking sites do this, but I believe Furl was the first making it the most widely used.

Required reading:

Benefits of Using Furl and Del.icio.us Together for Research

Social Bookmarking Table of Contents