the Onda

Update: for those that just want my furl2del.icio.us migration tool, click here.

This is much bigger than an individual post-- it's actually a riff I will come back to many times over the next few months-- but because I have something useful to share, I want to start with just a small post. And that needs to start with a story:

Back in the fall of 2003, my friend Jerry Michalski told me about this really neat service that had just been launched called Furl. Furl was a web-based bookmark manager that went a step further in that it could also suck the contents out of public URLs into your own private index. It was slick, it was quick, and in a way it was very Web 2.0 way it had been put together by a small team from western MA in just a few months. At the time I remember mentioning Del.icio.us to Jerry as they had also recently launched but we both agreed that Del.ici.ous was too crude and flakey to be relied on.

Not very much time passed (as Jerry said before the paint was even dry) before Looksmart snapped Furl up and made loads of promises about how they were going to keep it the same, scale it out, blah, blah, blah. And they made good on the promise in one way: they kept the features of the app pretty much static. Unfortunately it feels like they kept the backend scaling static as well because the webapp seemed to slow to an absolute crawl, at times stopping to get PI to a few million significant digits before letting you actually bookmark something.

In the meantime though, Del.icio.us just got better and better. The app stopped being flakey. It kept a nice simple interface that was AJAXed to kingdom come. And most importantly, as the userbase grew, Del.icio.us became a really interesting social experiment.

So, where am I going with this? Well after having invested 204 bookmarks worth of content into Furl (all carefully organized and rated) I realized that I would much rather be working with Del.icio.us and worried that due to the roach motel motel model that many portals pursue in their "monetization"" strategy, I was probably doomed to starting my bookmark list all over again.

Except that in the end Furl did exactly the right thing in this Web 2.0 world we live in. Right in the "Tools" section of the website is a one-button option for getting your entire Furl archive as xml. The format is absolutely trivial (if you've ever parsed an XML file) and a scant 60 minutes after discovering it, I had all 204 of my Furl bookmarks imported into Del.icio.us. Key to this was also Del.icio.us's great web API for remotely adding bookmarks (RESTian and very very simple) but it was Furl's openness that most struck me as just great (are you listening Yahoo? Google?).

For anyone stuck in the same quandry and looking to get off Furl, I've uploaded my script here so that you too can move over to Del.icio.us. It requires a Python 2.2+ runtime which is really easy to get over here and it doesn't have much in the way of error checking, but it might at the very least help you as a template. You use it by calling unfurlIt.py from the command-line and passing your Del.icio.us credentials and the path to your exported furl.xml file. If there is any interest in using it a serious migration tool, I might wrap it in a simple Tkinter GUI and add the ability to suck the furl archive straight off the site so just let me know.

Of course, it occured to me that you sort of have to be a geek to do this kind of thing. So I started thinking about a standard format for data and metadata that all of these sites could comply with, a la Steve's much-evangelized attention.xml. Maybe OPML (which seems to be all the rage) could fill in here? But after a little more thought, I realized that this places the burden on the wrong shoulders. Any Web 2.0 engineering plan will for sure have a line-item called "data migration/export" and it will also for sure be the first thing dropped from the schedule when time gets tight. Forcing hackers to comply with some external data format is expecting too much under these circumstances.

But what we could to is start a public repository of snippets of code, sort of like O'Reilly's new Codezoo that could serve as common pool of data migration tools for X web service to Y web service or Z application file-format. Folks could contribute their own little hacks and perhaps together we could then help all the non-geeks avoid the roach motel. How is that for a collaborative lazy-web way of fixing things?

In the meantime, thank you Furl. It's been a nice ride and I'm leaving (with my data) a happy user. Way to set an example for everyone else.

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