I’ve been playing around with the Furl Beta. It’s looking pretty good. Essentially, it’s a personal online cache of web pages that you can view, search, and share. Better than bookmarking because you can search the contents of it later, and it’s accessible from any browser. You can even provide RSS feeds to your Furl content.  Collaborative research on the internet just got a whole lot easier.

One drawback, there does not appear to be any way to make the cache private, so I can’t possibly use it, because there is no way I want a public database of every site I find interesting or useful. I definitely would share some of it with some people, but totally public is not an option.

Perhaps there will be a pay service for a private space.

Update: My bad. Just mark the item private when you Furl it.  Duh.  Didn’t see that on the Furl dialog and still don’t see how to make a public item private (except to change its topic to personal, but then I lose the utility of topics). Anyway, now the biggest drawback is that the first dialog comes up at the wrong size and there is no scrollbar, so you can’t see the buttons.