Spurl.net

» see spurl.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i missed Spurl entirely. in 2004 i was at university and the bookmarking argument was happening in english-language blogs i was not reading, and out of that whole wave exactly one name travelled far enough to reach me later, which was del.icio.us. Spurl was the one from Iceland, and it was better at the thing that actually mattered.

Hjalmar Gislason built it in Reykjavik in 2004. on the surface it was the same product as everyone else's that year. you clicked a button in a browser sidebar, the page went into your account with tags on it, other people could see what you had saved unless you told it not to. groups could build shared directories on a subject. you needed a username and a password and nothing else, no real name, no email (close enough).

the difference was underneath. Spurl did not just store the address, it stored the page. every bookmark came with a cached copy of the text, which meant you could run a full-text search across everything you had ever saved and find the paragraph you half-remembered rather than the title you had forgotten. it also meant your bookmarks kept working after the sites behind them died, which in 2004 was already happening constantly.

that turned out to be a search engine with a bookmarking site attached, and the founder noticed. in December 2005 he pointed the same crawling and indexing machinery at the Icelandic web and launched a search engine for the country. five months later, in May 2006, Ja.is bought the company. Ja is the Icelandic directory business, the yellow pages, later spun out of the national telecom, and what it wanted was the search stack.

~ the dossier ~

~ what happened to the site after ~

nothing dramatic, which is the usual ending for these. the technology went into the acquirer and became the basis of a directory company's search. the bookmarking site stayed up, unbothered and unimproved, for another four or five years while the category it belonged to quietly emptied out.

the archive puts the last full pages in late 2010. by the middle of 2011 the address was serving a stub, and by that October it had stopped serving anything at all and started redirecting. nobody wrote it up. Furl had already been folded into Diigo and Ma.gnolia had already lost its database in the famous way. Spurl going quiet in an Icelandic corner did not make anybody's news.

~ what it was right about ~

saving the link was never the hard part. the hard part is that links rot, and a bookmark to a page that no longer exists is a note about something you cannot read anymore. Spurl solved this in 2004 by keeping the text, and then the whole category died without the idea being carried forward by the survivors.

it came back later under other names. Pinboard sells an archival tier that stores page copies, and every read-it-later app since has been built on holding the text rather than the address. Gislason went on to build DataMarket and then GRID and is better known for those. for whatever reason the bookmarking one is the piece of his work that had the idea everyone else needed.

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