Day: September 26, 2004

Furl.Net recently got bought out by LookSmart. Good for them. I don’t use their service anymore, but it is a good idea and its creators deserve to get rewarded.

Which reminded me that I wanted to post the two major reasons that I abandoned Furl in favor of the Slogger plug-in for FireFox which does the same thing, only better, plus can be configured to capture almost every web site you visit (it is unable to save 404 pages automatically, for example).

Anyway, the major reason I stopped using Furl is that it doesn’t appear to save the images on pages locally. So if I Furl a page with lots of graphics, Furl doesn’t copy the graphics, but rather keeps the image tags pointing to the original site which is sort of pointless. A friend of mine’s web server got owned by some hackers and I Furled the page to taunt him later, but none of the images were saved so the effort was wasted.

The other reason is that Furl simply doesn’t scale to heavy use,

To show how serious that commitment is, we are officially allocating 5
gigabytes (GB) of storage for each individual member’s public archive,
enough space to store tens of thousands of archived items.

Based on the last month, my Slogger folder is going to archive about 240,000 pages every year and require 37 gb/year for storage. That would be significantly lower on Furl since they’re not saving graphics, CSS and other associated files and they’re not automatically saving all pages which results in some duplication, but it would still be a lot more than 5 gb.

On Friday, Engadget wrote about Ongo Bongo, a service that offers Netflix-style rentals of CDs for $22/month. They have some sort of initial offering where if you pay $264 up front for a year’s service, they’ll throw in an IPod mini.

This is proably a scam, and if it isn’t then it’s going to get carpet bombed by the music industry. It is illegal to rent CDs in the United States unless you are a non-profit. They appear to be trying to find a way around the law by setting up a system where they claim they are selling music but the return policy is so liberal that they are clearly in the rental business.

Q: Why would I join OB’s “music lovers” club?

A: Membership in OB’s “music lovers” club, carries special rewards for our members
one free CD (random selection) after 12 months of continuous membership
100% free shipping on all ‘software’ (CD) orders
unlimited ‘return credits’ for all ‘software’ (CD) orders
your first 4 CD purchases are included FREE in the annual membership cost
special limited time promotional offers available to “music lovers” club members only.

For the record, I think the ban on commercial renting of musical recordings is stoopid, but that’s the law and Ongo Bongo is likely to get smacked down by the RIAA long before you’d use 12 months of their service.