Social Bookmarking Group Project Part 3: Choice of Software

Why
did we Choose Furl?

After surveying a number of different
software options, including del.icio.us, connotea, citeulike and Zotero, we
settled on furl. It has the cleanest interface, and offers the right blend of
2.0 technology and traditional search capability.

Interface

Furl has a clean, easy to read interface.
It does not have all of the functionality of some other available software, but
our needs are fairly simple. A lot of extra functions would have cluttered our
interface, and not been widely used. As well, the text of these other sites
consistently refers to academic research, and this would distract from our
fiction-focussed content. Furl is fun and easy.

We had a number of fields that we wanted to
include with each entry. These were: title, description, citation, genre,
keywords, rating, name of reviewer. We also wanted to be able to provide an RSS
feed. All of these were possible with Furl, and the distinct fields showed up
nicely on the main search screen. We were able to create easy-to-read records,
with all vital information clearly laid-out, similar to a catalogue record.
Records on some of the other sites we considered appeared jumbled, with a
clutter of hyperlinks and different-sized text.

Functionality

Few of the other sites we looked at offered
a rating function like Furl’s, which we thought was an important element to
include in a book review. As well, Furl offers full-text searching, and we
thought that a staff of librarians would find this very useful, as they can
build fairly sophisticated searches.

In choosing Furl we also lost a few
functions. For example, keywords do not show up on the main search page, either
as simple lists or as tag clouds, so that users have to click through a title
to find keywords. Connotea and Citeulike offer tag clouds. They even allow
users to drill down through clusters of related tags, to narrow down their
search.

Although Furl does not offer this very 2.0
function, it still offers strong searching ability, as mentioned above. Users
can search multiple keywords at once, much like a traditional catalogue, to
find what they are looking for. Since it is mainly experienced librarians that
will be using the site, this should be adequate, and perhaps even preferable,
because it keeps the interface clean.

Other sites also list the names of
contributors that have used particular keywords, so that users can see which
contributors are tagging heavily in particular subject areas. This is not
necessary for our project, however, because contributors will all be known to
one another, and will easily become familiar with each other’s specializations.
Librarians can still search according to contributor using the full-text
search, and since they will know the rest of the staff, they should have a
fairly easy time of deciding whose reviews they want to search. As well, long,
unkempt lists of hyperlinked contributor names are untidy, and, once again,
clutter the interface.

Conclusion

In short, by opting for the simplicity of
Furl, we lose only a small amount of functionality. For the most part, we can
perform all of the same searches, using a more traditional keyword search
window, instead of clouds and lists. This keeps the site clean and easy to use,
and is a good choice for librarians who are experienced searchers.