LookSmart Hands Over Social Bookmarking Service Furl to Diigo
Search advertising network LookSmart and Diigo, a popular web annotation and research tool, announced a new partnership today. Under the terms of this partnership, LookSmart will transfer Furl, its struggling social bookmarking service, to Diigo. However, while Diigo announced this as an acquisition of Furl, the reality is that Looksmart is getting an equity position in Diigo in return.
LookSmart acquired Furl in September 2004. At the time, the company announced that it wanted to leverage the data it gathered about users' online behavior through Furl in order to create better search algorithms for web search. Over time, however LookSmart has withdrawn from proving search and the company sold off its FindArticles search engine to CNET in late 2007. Given that Furl is not part of LookSmart's core business anymore, it only makes sense for the company to offload responsibility for the service. We can't help but wonder if LookSmart actually tried to sell Furl, but, given the current economic climate, wasn't able to find a partner who wanted to acquire the service directly.
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