Looksmart Closes Zeal, Concentrates on Furl.net

Looksmart Closes Zeal, Concentrates on Furl.net

In what is a bit of a sad day in the world of search engines and directories, Looksmart has announced the closing of their Zeal directory. Being an O.Z. Original Zealot (who has not used the directory in 4 years) I highly enjoyed being active in the Zeal directory after its launch and during its post Looksmart growth.

Zeal was one of the open community directories which took off in the early days of search marketing, along with ABC Go.com’s GoGuides, and was a bit of an alternative to the Netscape Open Directory Project.

Looksmart sent out and email message to members of Zeal (as posted on SEW by Danny Sullivan), here’s a snippet:

Thank you for being a part of the Zeal community and contributing your time and knowledge to the Directory. After trying to put the deserved resources behind Zeal, we have made the conscious decision to shut down Zeal.com. On March 28, 2006 Zeal will no longer be available. We are not selling Zeal.com and have no future plans for it at this time.

The announcement by Looksmart also marks the overall change of the Internet and site classification, which has moved from the slow directory submital & exclusive editor categorical process to the vibrant & instant world of social search, bookmarking and tagging.

Such 2.0 oriented techniques bring the task of defining a site, blog or idea via tags and citations to the public, and takes such important off-site SEO from the manipulative hands of the few and into the organic arms of the many.

Marking the evolution of web categorization from directories to social bookmarks and tags, Looksmart sees opportunity in the closing of Zeal to remind its users of their flagship 2.0 offering, Furl.net.

We think that avid Zeal users will appreciate the large, interesting and vital community at Furl.net (www.furl.net). Furl is an online book marking service that helps you save information that’s important to you, share it with others and see what others are saving and find important.

With Furl you can:

* Save Web pages to a personal, permanent archive with 5GB of storage
* Revisit the full text of your favorite Web pages
* Share articles and information with friends and family members with simple email pass-along tools
* Use Furl as a platform for social networking and discovering useful information
* Share articles and information with people that share common interests using RSS feeds
* See what other Furl members are saving and sharing
* Save your favorite Zeal content