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Why do people use Spurl?

I have a serious question for you social bookmarking types out there. I’ve been playing with spurl.net for the last hour or so and I’m really puzzled. It’s not a terrible site by any means, but I’m having real trouble figuring out what kind of usage patterns explain its apparently extraordinary number of URLs and users. It’s got some nice features here and there (liking the archives of top links for previous weeks, for example) but basically I’m stuck and cannot really figure out how or why people choose spurl over any of the other (many dozens) of social bookmarking sites out there. But there must be a reason because so many people are doing it. Any Spurl users out there who can explain their preference?

11 replies on “Why do people use Spurl?”

I’m not a spurl user, but I would guess it’s the usefulness of the discover page – you can tune the timeframe you want to sample for popular links, giving you a kind of variable filter for freshness of links.
I use a similar service built on del.icio.us called LiveMarks. I get the odd link that’s useful after I have exhausted all the usual sources of content.
I would guess a lot of usefulness of these services to the user has to do with the tastes of the bookmarkers and the subsequent popularity of the types of links that rise to the top.

My take on this (also as a non-spurl user) is that it’s full-text search.
I built my own single-user bookmarking tool a few years ago, and my main way of navigating through it is full-text search. I occasionally think about exporting all my bookmarks to delicious, but the lack of search stops me — I guess I’d have to run them in parallel.
By some weird coincidence I happened to have Social Bookmarking Tools (in which you are credited as a reviewer) open in a tab, ready to read, when I saw this post. Now I just have to read it, rather than skimming it to compare features :-).

At the time I started using it, it was the only service which also saved pages. This feature by itself put it heads and shoulders ahead of the competition, which at that time was mainly (perhaps only) deli.icio.us. Spurl lacks the social features of delicious, and the squeaky clean urls, but having cached copies of all your bookmarked pages is worth that.
Starting out again, I would probably choose something like magnolia, which is all shiny and Web2.0 (and also saves webpages!).
Or something selfhosted…

I use it for two reasons:
1) It saves a copy of the page for later use if the real page goes away.
2) It has a bookmarklet that simultaneously posts to my delicious links – since I find delicious a quicker way to actually view/search my links.
So, essentially, Spurl is just an archiving tool for me.

My 2c — I’m not interested in the “social” aspects, and I don’t find ‘tagging’ particularly useul. Spurl gives me a good non-local bookmark tree that’s easy to use.

I’m with everyone else on the fact that it saves pages, so no dead links. Also when you search all the text on the page is searched, not just the tags and text that you decide to save it as. I used to use del.icio.us but I always found it hard to anticipate what I would be searching for later when labeling a page. Using the spurl search is like doing a google search of my saved pages.
Along with KO if I was starting again I would use ma.gnolia.

Just as a matter of interest – MyWeb does full page saving too. Were you unaware of that or do you not like it? Also why choose ma.gnolia.com over del.icio.us? I’m trying to fathom people’s motives for using these other sites. What are the reasons people go towards one kind of site rather than another? What is it about a social bookmarking thing that makes people want to use it more.

Seems like the people whom I have been asking what their favorite service is and why have three criteria: 1) features (saving pages, easy to understand RSS, share a link with people or a group); 2) ease of use (usable interface, simple, presentation meets expectations); 3) where their friends and peers are hanging out (this gets to who is using the service and sharing things tagged with my vocabulary and my interests as well as my friends are using the service and that adds value).
My favorite is MyWeb 2, mostly because there are enough people with similar interests in my community that use a similar vocabulary. This is insanely valuable to me as I often do not tag an item with a term I would normally use, when I use MyWeb 2 others in my community have more than likely not only bookmarked it but tagged it with a tag that I forgot to add (but is the term I am using to refind that information).
Others use the community has a human filter on the flood of information. It is often not what is popular that is important, but what falls through the cracks that is of interest an has value. Tools like Digg and other popular filtering tools, may not fit my taste or information needs. But a good community of similar interests, particularly in a niche, that finds things that I should be seeing (not that my community knows that) and it not on the radar or in the tag cloud (there is rarely anything I am ever seeking that I have found through using a tag cloud). I like the tools that help surface things out of the community with out it being a self selecting group (the groups start out well, but often dilute into groups that do not match the level of items I am seeking. I really like the MyWeb 2 community approach as it filters things fairly well (I really really need to be able to manage the edges of people in my community (give me everything person X bookmarks except these 6 tags or show me only these 14 tags from person Z) as I really do not care to have the CNN homepage or AOL homepage come through again).

Why do people use Windows XP over Mac OS X? ‘Cause it’s better!
Why do people use Mac OS X over Windows XP? ‘Cause it’s better!
People aren’t explainable. The very definition of our kind is “irrational”.

I really like the idea of MyWeb, but – like so many of these things – it suffers from the street performer problem: without a crowd there’s no show. Part of what makes del.icio.us and Flickr so attractive is that they deliver value for user #1, which makes them a good tool for users who can’t or don’t want to do the whole ‘social’ thing as well as those that hunt in packs. Besides, when MyWeb came out I was already using del.icio.us, which didn’t do all that MyWeb offered but did seem to do all tht MyWeb actualy did, so I couldn’t be bothered switching.
And then there’s the whole anti-corporate thing, which led me subsequently to jump ship from del.icio.us to Simpy.
I’ve tried Ma.gnolia, but I found it ridiculously under-featured. Specifically, it didn’t seem to enable tag-based bulk-editing, either to delete a given tag or to delete all bookmarks tagged with it. (I was particularly annoyed with this because I’d followed the suggestion of importing all your Firefox bookmarks with a ‘firefox’ tag.) Also the interface isn’t as clean as del.icio.us or Simpy: they seem to be trying to make it manageable by limiting the amount of information displayed, whereas the great discovery of del.icio.us is that even an apparently boundless profusion of information can be made manageable by tagging and ranking.

I too use Spurl as online backup for my, mostly private, bookmarks.
It took 3 or 4 days to ‘process’ the extensive nested list of links from Firefox.

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