Spurl: super webtool with service too

The online bookmarking tool Spurl reached version 1.0 last week, and looks like a must-use tool for anyone organising and republishing their bookmarks. Spurl enables you, when browsing web sites, save online the location together with a description and other information. Useful enough if you want to access bookmarks from different computers, or research sites with colleagues and create a shared list.
However, the exciting features, for me anyway, are that you can both categorise and tag your sites and create an RSS feed from the list, and also publish your collections of links.
Suppose you manage a web site where you want to show useful resources as lists of links. Usually they get done once and it is a pain to edit and update them. With Spurl you research sites, categorise and tag them, then insert a feed (or a bit of Javascript) into your links page. When you find something on other site, add that to Spurl, and it gets added to your site automatically. If you find a site has changed, edit the information in Spurl and the change ends up on your site.
If you find inserting the feeds tricky, you can publish some or all of your bookmarks...Spurl creates a publicly-viewable page, excluding bookmarks you have marked private. So you could just put a link from your site to that.
One additional treat is that if you have an account with del.icio.us - which also saves your bookmarks online in a different way - the sites you tag in Spurl also end up on del.icio.us, where they go into the growing pool of tagged sites.
Here's another plus: service. I spent some time with Spurl yesterday, and it all seemed fine until I tried to get feeds from categories. Some worked, some didn't. I emailed support, and within a couple of hours had a response from Spurl founder Hjalmar Gislason, doubling up on help desk, saying he had fixed it. "Happy spurling, and spread the word," he said. Glad to.
When I have a bit more time I'll document using Spurl and del.icio.us (the help system is a bit lacking and out of date). Meanwhile I just wanted to get the word out, and maybe pick up some comments or links from others trying the service. Oh, and it's free. Interviews with Hjalmar explaining how here and also here.
Update: I've been back to look at the other major online bookmarking system, Furl. It promotes the ability to save a page when you bookmark it, which is worth doing if you think the item may disappear. Spurl does this too, if you choose an 'advanced' setting. Furl doesn't have tags, but you can do multiple categories (unlike Spurl) and you can configure manually RSS feeds from categories, as the help system explains. Not so easy as Spurl, and you don't get the Javascipt to insert into web pages. Nice to have choice and competition among free services.
Update: comparison of Furl, Spurl and del.icio.us features: download pdf

Comments

[Bronwyn]

Actually, you can have a Furl linklist in your site -- I do. The instructions for it are at http://www.furl.net/shareSite.jsp. The various other ways you can share your furled sites are at http://www.furl.net/faq.jsp#howShare.

I'd like to know exactly how the two services differ, because they sound item-by-item similar from what I know of them.