When web 2.0 goes bad: Furl and Diigo
Last week the social bookmarking site Furl.net announced that it had been taken over by rival Diigo and was to discontinue its service. Users were offered what sounded like a painless transition to Diigo. But it soon became obvious that Diigo was not equipped to handle the volume of transfers. There were also one or two bugs and inconsistencies involved in transferring the Furl metadata, and Diigo’s caching service has not been active for a while now. For the details see the Diigo user forums.
As a Furl user since January 2007, I had come to see the service as an indispensable part of my research toolkit. Unlike the other social bookmarking services, including market leader Delicious, Furl stored cached snapshots of each page as you saved it. RSS feeds of the last 20 pages could be fed into other web pages, such as the New Political Communication Unit feedroll.
Furl also provided a range of export features. These were clunky but at least you could export your whole archive. You could access your archive from any web browser, so you always had a central, shareable repository of interesting things. I frequently used Furl in my teaching and research. I never quite understood why such a powerful tool like Furl was free and would gladly have paid a small monthly subscription to use it.
Furl is no more. Diigo is inferior in several ways, not least because the transfer of the Furl archives will not capture the stored pages but will crawl out to the current version of the page at the URL and save that. And it does not currently support export of your whole archive. So much for web archiving.
I’ve given up on Diigo and have moved to Iterasi. It’s caching is slick and it has imported my Furl archive without a hitch. Iterasi, like Diigo, has taken snapshots of the pages as of now, which is a pain, but given how quickly the transfer process occurred, I can live with that. I’ll have to take my chances with Iterasi and hope that they introduce an export feature at some point.
Of course, all of this points to a fatal weakness of web 2.0 and “cloud computing.”
These problems are felt particularly acutely by academic researchers because we have come to depend on these innovations for our daily work. What we really need are tools that we control, which combine the accessibility and user-friendliness of the best of the web 2.0 applications with a strong sense of user-led design on the part of social scientists.
Too often, software applications designed “in house” by academics suffer from poor usability and weak design, and too often they are tied to the desktop model of computing. They are also no less subject to the vagaries of the market. Many of the popular applications such as Endnote or Nvivo are extremely expensive and the status of projects can change, as the transition to from “free” to “paid for” on the part of the previously free transcribing software Transana demonstrates.
