I definitely see the possibility of using these kinds of tools for research assistance.
At our library, we bookmark useful reference sources on the web using Furl, and I also have my own account. However, I have not really taken advantage of the social aspect of Furl yet. Furl pages strike me as much less cluttered than del.icio.us pages, but I also get the impression that furl does not have nearly as much traffic as del.icio.us. I managed to import my Furl archive into my del.icio.us account while doing the discovery exercises, so now I am planning to spend some time comparing the features of both of these services in terms of usefulness for health sciences libraries.
I have stopped bookmarking through my browser at work; I was one of those people with the really long and long bookmarks list. I like Furl much better.
