I've been following the hooplah over Niall Kennedy, the Technorati employee who did a derivative work on a World War II poster about keeping secrets secret. I haven't seen the new art, but he did describe it, and sheez, it sounds pretty harmless (and self-referential). Can someone explain why this post evoked such a response from Technorati management? Anyone have a theory about it? (I have my own, but want to hear others first.)
# Posted by Dave Winer on 3/8/05; 2:00:56 PM - --
My project this morning is to familiarize myself with Furl. Here are my notes.
1. I went to furl.com first, it's a marketer's site, very confusing. The Furl you want is furl.net.
2. The setup for the bookmarklet was confusing, I didn't know what to drag, or why I'd want the no-popup version, but once I figured it out, and started looking around, it was friendlier than del.icio.us, which has lots of confusing warnings about it being pre-pre-alpha, etc. Furl is not perfect, but they talk to users, not geeks, and it's encouraging not cautionary.
3. When filing a bookmark, they offer a set of pre-defined topics, in a popup menu, this is a good idea. Helps the newbie get started. Not sure what the difference between topics and keywords are. And while it was nice to have multiple topics, it wasn't clear how the user interface worked.
4. They also seem to save the text of the page so if the link rots, I still have the clipping. However this clipping is just for the user that furled it, to address the copyright issue.
5. Here's the first item I furled.
6. The FAQ is interesting.
7. Furl, unlike del.icio.us, has search. Here's a search for all posts that have Apple as a keyword. And one for RSS.
8. Like del.icio.us, Furl provides feeds for everything, but Furl uses the simpler and more common RSS 2.0 format. Here's an example of a Furl feed for all members, here's the feed for Apple, and here's the feed for my account. It's cool that they've defined a namespace for information that Furl maintains, but is not part of the RSS 2.0 format. Very nice work.
9. The fact that there's an RSS 2.0 feed means that you could use Furl as the user interface for all kinds of stuff, for example a simple blogging system. So it pays to work on the UI, to make it as simple as possible.
10. One thing I'm looking for and haven't found is an API. Does Furl have one?
# Posted by Dave Winer on 3/8/05; 11:07:58 AM - --
