Save your favorite web pages

If you’re like most web surfers, you’ve probably returned to a favourite website or page only to find that the information you liked so much on your last visit has been changed or deleted. A new service from i-drive.com, a U.S. company that provides free online file storage space via the Net, promises to change all that.

Filo is a browser-based application that can save an entire copy of any Web page. From news articles to e-commerce receipts to travel research, you can now collect, access and share information you find on the Internet. Everything collected with Filo goes into your “i-drive” (personal file space on the i-drive server) where you can store it as long as you like, without fear of it being altered or deleted.

Filo is far more than a browser’s bookmarks, since it captures the actual page and transfers it directly to an i-drive account. If the page later disappears from the original site, the “Filo’ed” copy remains in an i-drive account. Filo enables members to store pages for later reference, while keeping all the page links intact. All clipped pages are stored in i-drive’s Filo folder and can be managed like any i-drive file–for access, transfer and shang.

“It’s a ‘killer app’ for any Internet user,” says Jeff Bonforte, CEO of i-drive.com. “If you see a Web page you’d like to keep — clip it. No more having to print hard copies or rely on bookmarks that often go dead. All the pages you clip with Filo are in your i-drive for you to share and access from home, work, or on the road.”

The company offers an interesting example of how the service can be used. An avid traveler used the preview version of Filo to plan a recent vacation. When she found interesting Web content on possible destinations in the Caribbean, she used i-drive.com’s Filo to clip and save the pages to her i-drive. She then organized the clipped pages in a shared folder in her i-drive, and invited her friends to visit the results of her Web research so they could help her decide where to travel.