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Furl Changes Hands

March 19, 2009
by Marisa Taylor
Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

Marisa Taylor

This week Diigo acquired fellow social-bookmarking service Furl from LookSmart, a San Francisco online advertising company. Terms weren’t disclosed, but LookSmart said in a statement it would receive “a potential equity position” in Diigo in exchange for Furl.

LookSmart bought Furl in 2004, and while it reached one million users, it didn’t quite catch on like Delicious, which has five million users and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.

LookSmart’s unloading of Furl isn’t the first consolidation made in the social bookmarking space this year. Yahoo (YHOO) recently closed down MyWeb in order to focus on Delicious, and Google (GOOG) just shuttered Shared Stuff.

Yesterday, as LookSmart discussed its earnings with analysts, CEO Ted West said the company faced several challenges with Furl. “We did see substantial commoditization of social bookmarking services and their availability across the web–commoditization in terms of numbers of providers,” he said.

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