Last night I signed up with a free online bookmarking/archiving service called Furl. It’s pretty awesome. The premise of it is that it’s a web-based replacement for bookmarking items, or putting them in your favorites folder. Myself, I don’t use bookmarks, but I do make shortcuts and place them on the desktop for things I don’t have the time or inclination to read at the moment, but want to come back to. But that get’s really messy.

Plus, you can’t access your bookmarks on another computer. But this is web-based, so it eliminates that problem. The other cooler thing that it does though is it automatically saves a cached/archived version of any page that you bookmark. This way, if pages ever get moved or taken down, you still have your copy of them. They host all these cached files on their server somehow, so you don’t even have to deal with it. Plus, what’s more, you can do searches through their website which will run through all the items you have in your archives. I’ve always wanted a quick easy way to scan things in my history, and this seems great.

You can set up categories and assign multiple categories to each bookmark. You can also rate things, set up keyword references, comments and include snippets from the piece, to make search and retrieval even easier. Personally, I think their interface design could use some work; a couple things are kind of confusing, but overall it’s good. I just wonder how long this is going to remain as a free service. Hopefully Google will come along and buy them, and then make sure it stays free, like they did with Blogger.

Oh, also, they have a toolbar that you can install, or else you can just drag a link into your existing toolbar, which will allow you to “Furl” articles.

Besides that, you can also send people the link to your Furl archive. This is my archive. You can also set up certain categories or entries to be private, so you don’t have to worry about that. Also, you can “subscribe” to other people’s archives via email or RSS, and there’s even a javascript which will let you show your links on the side of a blog.

Actually, that’s the other main benefit of this service, from my perspective. Is that I’m always finding links which I like, and which are important, but which I just don’t feel like blogging about for whatever reason. This is a great way to have kind of a holding area for things which didn’t make the cut to full-fledge blogdom.

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On another note, I also found this link through other Furl members, which contains all kinds of awesome tools and plugins for Gmail. Some of the ones I want to check out:

1. A little windows app which notifies you when you get a new gmail
2. Scripts which associate all mailto: links to gmail, instead of outlook
3. A tool to import emails into gmail
4. A plugin to use Gmail to back up web files