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Too many social networks. Too many social bookmarking services. Social networks haven’t been around all that long, but already they have some negative associations. Social networks are black holes for sucking time, or, do I really need one more social network to add my information to and try to maintain? But just because the word ‘Social’ is in the same breadth as bookmarking, doesn’t mean that using a social bookmarking service is anything like your Facebook’s and your MySpace’s. There are a lot of choices for sharing links out there, Delicious, Magnolia, Diigo, Furl, Blinklist and many other options and variations. I started out using Delicious, and briefly used Blinklist. But Diigo blows every competitor out of the water because it is more robust and built will groups in mind.

As a collector, my knowledge of repair and restoration is in it’s infancy stage. I am a creative thinker and don’t easily understand schematics and electrical design. Reading articles written by experts on these subjects are like pulling teeth, I want the imformation I need, and I want it now. I have better things to do. So, what if I could find a resource on monitor repair and have the section already highlighted that might be of particular interest? That is just one of the many features of Diigo, highlighting and annotations. What if I want follow another collector who I know is an expert at restoration, like Brian Jones? Well, let’s say Brian had an account and he was adding bookmarks, I could then browse what he was adding and his annotations and pick up some helpful insights into arcade cabinet restoration that I wouldn’t have had before. Instead of one person searching for information, now it’s two. Add in a whole community of users and you have a very target user base of information. The possibilities are limitless.

Ever-since we got a sneak peak at Diigo, I've been playing around with it and marveling at the latest feature releases. Diigo is the product of hardwork, deep understanding of what end users want, and one of the most feature complete social annotation services I know of. Last week, the team at Diigo released some great updates that make it all the better reason to switch from whatever social bookmarking tool you're using, to Diigo. Here's a rough outline of what the team has been up to:Easier to Bookmark: Recent updates allows users to add a 'Diigolet' to their bookmarks; a button that allows you to add whatever page you are viewing to your Diigo bookmarks, an invaluable tool for information hungry users.Importing/Exporting: Badges are the 'hip' thing right now and Diigo doesn't want to miss out on it. So, they will be releasing a linkroll that will allow users to add their recent bookmarks to their blogs or websites to share what they have been bookmarking. You can also import your Del.icio.us bookmarks to your Diigo account.Toolbars: The Diigo toolbar has also been upgraded. You can blog about the page you are viewing with the "Blog-This" button, as well as instantaneously add the page you are viewing to your bookmarks.

Our design philosophy is simple -- what makes the most sense to us as users, what we'd like to have as users ourselves, and what are some creative ways to do things even better... We'd like to continue thinking out-of-the-box, and not to be totally bound by traditional framework or method of doing things.What Diigo has to do is really stick out to users; and that's pretty hard to do when there are a great number of other competing services. That's exactly what Diigo does. For those that are looking for a head-on review, I suggest you take a peak at our initial preview.