Privacy Settings for Furl

I was playing around with Google's Desktop search today and in the process discovered that Furl allows Google to index my saved pages on Furl! (Just google "furl + userid" and you'll see what I mean) In my opinion, this is a significant privacy violation. So after poking around, I recommend you change the default settings on Furl.

1. Go to http://www.furl.net and login.
2. Click on the "My Settings" tab.
3. Click on the "Preferences" link right underneath the tabs.
4. Change the default privacy setting to "private."
5. Uncheck the "Allow Spiders" option.
6. Click the save button.

These settings should be the default! And they sure don't make it easy for you to make these changes. From this point on, your newly furled pages will be marked private. To convert your current public pages to private pages, follow these instructions:

1. Click on the "My Archive" tab.
2. Click the "Select all" checkbox.
3. On the "More actions..." drop-down, select "Make private."
4. Click on the OK button.
5. Repeat this step for your other furled pages.

A collegue of mine complained that Furl was too hard to use because of all the fields to fill out when you "furl" a page. Well, why catagorize when you have search? I recommend using the "Fast Furl" shortcut instead of the standard "Complete Furl" shortcut. Unfortunately "Fast Furl" doesn't work on all pages (e.g. NYTimes), but they're working on it. In the meantime, I have both Furl buttons on my Firefox shortcut toolbar.

My Furl Wishlist

• default privacy settings to "high"
• support PDF and major binary formats
• detect duplicate pages by content & timestamp and not by URL
• indicate in Firefox if a given page, by URL, has been furled and offer a "refresh furl" link
• understand that some content stories have multiple pages, so group them together
• offer Google search results next to MyFurl instead of Looksmart's
• "GroupFurl" features (more in a later blog)