sstream of consciousness

Recently I've got a Filangy invite and I spent some playing with that. Summary: great start but there aree many things to do.

First of all, I updated my bookmarking service comparison table. Now, down to the details.

The most important feature that distinguishes Filangy from other bookmarking services is that it indexes almost everything you browse. By "almost" I mean all web pages that are not under password. Filangy also does not do anything about pages on SSL servers (urls that start with https://).

This is most wonderful and most scary feature of Filangy (and most touted by its creators, too). If you know Slogger, you may think of Filangy as a Slogger that is constantly in record mode but saves results on the Net instead of local drive.

This is an approach that is different from that my favourite bookmarking service Furl takes, when you have to submit to furl every individual page explicitly. And yes, there are situations when this is tedious, so batch indexing of all viewed pages might be very convenient.

Filangy software comes as a Firefox or Internet Explorer toolbar that submits most of the items in your history to a central server which performs indexing.

But beware, here is the catch! Filangy, by default, indexes pages unless it is explicitly told not to do so. Even disabling indexing is temporary - you may shut down indexing for 30 minutes and after that toolbar continues to do so. This is the thing that I consider extremely harmful to my privacy! I want to explicitly define what and when to index!

So here is my first wish to Filangy team: make indexing process fully controllable. For example, I just want to turn my indexing on, browse some interesting pages and then turn it off for the rest of the day. Please, take a look at Slogger interface! There are two mode: (a)record everything, (b) record page only when button is pushed explicitly.

Of course, it is also possible to disable Firefox extension, but that requires some non-trivial menu/dialog interaction and Firefox restart. Not a thing you'd like to perform several times a day.

Ok, let's proceed to secondary issues.

WebMarks feature of Filangy is actually a counterpart of bookmarking services: Furl, Yahoo MyWeb, and del.isio.us. But this feature is still in its infancy:

1. No user definable categories, tags, keywords, whatever. Only "Personal Score" counted by obscure algorithms
2. Impossible to assign user definable score
3. No "Social Bookmarking" features. All bookmarks are private. And "Those who filed that also filed this" feature is absent
4. Impossible to get a local copy

WebCache is a set of your indexed pages. To my surprise, you cannot browse your web history, you can only search it! This is odd, given that one is not a substitute for another - it is about flat view (search) vs sequential view (history). And I would like to see both.

Searching WebCache also sports nice and very promising feature - clustering of search results. By the way there are already search/meta-search engines that do clustering (like Vivisimo or Mooter).

However clustering button behaves strangely:

1. When I first perform search without clustering enabled and then press button afterwards, nothing is changed
2. To get results clustered I actually have to re-run the search with clustering enabled
3. But even after that pressing clustering button takes strange cycle:
   1. Stage 1: all results are clustered. Icon displays: "Clustering on"
   2. Stage 2: I press on icon. Results are now not clustered, icon displays: "Clustering off"
   3. Stage 3: I press on icon. Icon displays now "Clustering off", but results are still unclustered
   4. Stage 4: I press on icon. Icon displays now "Clustering off" and results are again clustered!
   5. Stage 5: I press on icon. Icon displays now "Clustering on" and results remain clustered.
   6. We are back at the beginning of stage 1 actually.

For now, I am going to permanently disable Filangy toolbar until Filangy team addresses my biggest concern. In future, I am going to use it along with Furl for continous indexing though.

If you want to try Filangy I have 5 invites (as of today, 28 Feb 2005). If you want one, send me a message via my feedback form and I will send you one. First come, first served.

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