I wrote about my favorite social bookmarking tool, Furl, almost a year ago. It is still my favorite tool, but since last week it is not the only one that I use for bookmarking and archiving at the same time. That was when I found out about Hanzo:web.
Hanzo:web does what Furl has done and more. It saves not only certain web page like Furl, but can save the link only (bookmarking), the context (page with its direct links), and even archive the whole site including its links (though it is limited to paid members).
Hanzo:web is generous enough to give its free members with 100 Mb/month of websites archiving (Furl is currently giving its free members a total quota of 5 Gigabytes). That is more than I ask for as I normally only save articles and news, and never have a need to archive context or even a whole site. For the latter I rely on the Internet Archive with its wonderful Wayback Machine, which as of now it says it has saved 85 billion pages from extinction!
The way Hanzo:web works is the same with Furl. We use their button or bookmarklet to save a link, web page, context or site, tag it and put some comments (Furl has another feature for rating a web page, which Hanzo doesn't have yet in the moment...). One cool thing in Hanzo:web is its collect form, which albeit so manual that we have to paste the site and the title, it saves us from dependence on the bookmarklet or toolbar button. This way we can save to Hanzo:web from any computer without having to install the tools (for example when we are in an internet cafe, airport lounge, etc.). It is ashamed that Furl never thought about it. It should be an easy thing for them to add.
However, as Hanzo:web is still in beta, there are many things that they need to improve to make it a better social bookmarking site. First of all, the saving speed is not stable yet. Most of the time it is slow. I just tried to save an article and it has taken me more than 2 hours to get it archived. It is already on the list of my archives but I can't still open it. Two hours is probably very rare as I was able to have my articles saved properly within 5 minutes last week. Still very contrast in comparison to Furl, which saves web page within a snap.
The archive list in Hanzo:web also has a lot of rooms for improvement. The only filter there is by tags. No filter by date. No multiple selection tool to move the tag, make it private/public, send email or delete the saved pages like in Furl. No saving to zip file as well for all archives. No recommendations or 'hanzomates' (people with similar tastes). Definitely there are many homeworks for Hanzo:web to prove their value.
Hanzo:web does give us a promising future and rare alternative on free archiving of web pages, which as far as I know, has been dominated by Furl.
For me personally, I still cling to Furl as my favorite archiving tool, but once a while I keep an eye on Hanzo:web for their development.
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