Jackie Danicki

I’ve given up on Furl, which truly stood out from the pack due to its caching of saved pages. It’s been buggy as hell for a while and ridiculously frustrating to use. Consequently, I stopped tagging pages altogether, which left me with loads of tabs open on a permanent basis - a situation that makes life more stressful than it need be. Is LookSmart waiting for someone to come along and buy Furl? I don’t know, and I don’t care anymore. I’ve abandoned that ship.

So thanks to Jeff Nolan for showing me Instapaper. It’s the fastest tool out there if you want to tag web pages for later exploration or deeper reading.

Like I said, Instapaper is extremely lightweight, which means it does not have a lot of the “social” add-ons that the likes of del.icio.us and Furl have. But to me, that’s a feature, not a bug. Instapaper does give you an RSS feed. So I can share the feed of my tagged pages with anyone I want, or syndicate the list in the sidebar of my blog - as I am now doing at left, below my picture. But I don’t have to fill in (or, as was usually the case with using Furl, ignore) a bunch of fields, or log in all the damn time. I just click the button on my browser toolbar and the page is saved. That is it.

The only feature I see missing which I’d like to have is the ability to export my data, but I have a feeling that’s on the way. I mean, this is 2008.

Filed under: Life