The News
If you go to Looksmart this morning, things will look ever so slightly different. There’s a link to Furl on the front page of the site. Hm… what’s Furl?
Furl is a sort of personal web archive. Instead of just bookmarking a site, Furl saves you the version of the page as presented that day as well as a link to the new version of the site. You can also create a daily link archive that other Furlers can subscribe to, and read your news feeds at their site.
This handy service was just acquired by LookSmart, as annoucned to its members in an email at around 1:25 am Pacific time this morning. They don’t expect any changes for the worse, but they’ have made one change for the better already.
Here’s a quote from the email:
“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.”
They also pledged to remain free.
My Own Wild Theories and Speculation
In the emal sent out to subscribers, CEO Mike Giles addressed the issue that many small or free services often face when they are aquired by a larger corporation. The ugly “sell-out” whisper inevitably rears its silly head.
As a subscriber of the service, I say more power to them. People who provide free information, services or tools have to eat, too. Kudos to him for heading those mutterings off at the pass.
As far as I’m concerned, especially with the vast increase in free space, they didn’t sell out – they made an educated decision for their own welfare and for the good of their service, and sold Up, as in Upgrade They’ll be able to do what they’re doing better and faster, and get the compensation they deserve for providing the Net with a great tool, all without having to charge the end user for it.
Seilling out is when you corrupt something creative that was beautiful the way it was, just for the sake of money.
While we’re on the topic, to any larger corporations listening, as long as you can guarantee in writing that I retain full creative control of my words, you can aquire me anytime. Asking price starts at $2 million though…. 
See the trackback section on the site for more links about this story (and send your buy offers by email only please).
