Group items tagged

This annotation feature is particularly powerful when used in conjunction with Diigo’s social features. Diigo allows you to create groups which can be public, private or semi-private, allowing you to collaborate on research through the use of links and annotation. Diigo also allows you to attach notes and comments that are visible only to the group, which is an extremely useful feature when sharing the link both publicly, as well as in a group context.

In addition to collaboration, Diigo’s social side is excellent for content discovery. The service can provide recommended bookmarks from other members based off of the links you have saved in the past, as well as recommending other users whose bookmarking habits seem to match yours. Diigo takes the “social” in social bookmarking very seriously, and provides very effective tools for finding friends on the service, as well as finding new people who have interests similar to your own. Friending another user doesn’t mean just making them a contact, it enables you to generate buddy lists, allowing you to organize sharing of bookmarks with friends, as well as providing a messaging system. Whereas in many other bookmarking services the sharing and social features seem to occur more as a byproduct of the sharing process, Diigo puts those social networking features front and center. However, Diigo’s interface is very content focused as well, making it clear that this isn’t a social network as much as it is a social tool.

The Diigolet is a surprisingly powerful bookmarklet, revealing sticky notes and annotations, as well as providing all the basic functionality a user needs. However, even with my hatred of adding additional rows to my browser window, the Diigo toolbar has won me over and become my tool of choice to interact with the service. Both tools will provide tag suggestions and assist with group functions, as well as the ability to send the link via email, however the toolbar goes even further. When using the toolbar, you also have the option of cross-posting your links to other bookmarking services, or even Twitter if you require. You can save simultaneously to Diigo, Delicious, Magnolia and Simpy, as well as to your own browser’s local bookmarks. Bookmarking to other services seems to work well, and saving to local bookmarks is a particularly awesome experience when using one of the latest betas of Firefox, which will attempt to auto-complete based on both history and bookmarks. It even correctly applies tags in the Firefox Places storage system, which is great but makes me wonder why the toolbar bothers to also build a hierarchal folder system inside Firefox as well, as the tags do that job already.

Another powerful feature that the toolbar adds is the Diigo sidebar:

the Diigo sidebar allows me to search and browse both my bookmarks and the bookmarks my friends have posted. In addition it allows me to get current information about the page I am viewing via the “This URL” tab. I can access public bookmarks and annotations, and lists of Diigo users who like the site. Diigo also can provide quick metrics about a site that I am visiting via the main toolbar. Using the “About This URL” menu option will provide a overall popularity score for the site, including a breakdown of the number of links to the site from Diigo, as well as from Google, Delicious, Yahoo myweb, Bloglines, Technorati, and Digg. Diigo also provides a calculation of the site’s Google PageRank, which is a really awesome bonus feature that I just discovered today.

As I have browsed through the user forums, this seems to be a common practice for the people behind Diigo to actively engage with their users for ideas, and respond constructively to critiques.

Diigo is really head and shoulders above the majority of competing social bookmarking services in terms of features, and the site itself is certainly more responsive than my beloved Magnolia, which is a wonderful service in itself, but runs slow as molasses.

In their own words from their website; Diigo enables effective collaborative research. You can easily share your findings, complete with your highlights and sticky notes, with friends and colleagues. A project team, a class, or a club can create a group on Diigo to pool relevant resources, findings and thoughts together.

for those of us who hate wasting time researching for something, and enjoy using the power of others to discover other information, Diigo social bookmarking is right up your alley.

How do I highlight the important arcade information? This another great feature of Diigo for bookmarking is the right click context menu. With Diigo installed, when you highlight a section on a page, your menu will come up with an option ‘Hightlight and Bookmark’.

Rival Clipmarks offers some similar annotation features.

t they’re offering a “better del.icio.us”

Diigo isn’t a terrible product, but I think it’s safe to say it’s going nowhere. Aside from the few hundred users who find the additional features useful, it’s unlikely to see any real adoption.

As I said in an email to you guys, I’m sorry for being so tactless about this - and you’re right that I didn’t give a fair run down of your features. Nonetheless, I do wonder if you might struggle to differentiate the offering in this market.

Best thing about Diigo by far is the inadvertent smiling walrus in the logo. The site’s starting a footrace that’s already over, but that walrus is seriously cute!

These services depend on volume to experience any success at all, being collective intelligence models.

If you have ever tried to use it I can assure you it is pretty painful. I am not sure if it is something personal to me, but I find their UI design very painful.

I say that review was spot on except for the line: “Diigo isn’t a terrible product”

Diigo Launches, Nobody Cares

If you’re looking for some awesome blogging and research tools in addition to everything you’d expect in a bookmarking service, then explore the depth of services that Diigo has to offer. In my opinion Diigo isn’t just a tool, it’s more akin to a household appliance.

This space is seriously crowed!

“Diigolet” (no Flock version yet)

I hate it when I read a nice blog post and at the bottom they have a “Liked this Article? Bookmark us!” section, and there are 26 entries (no kidding!).

Diigo is different, not because it can’t do what the other services do. It’s different because it puts the user’s needs first and centre, instead of using the user for information aggregation purposes.

32. the Wandering Author - July 29, 2006 What I don’t understand is why anyone should care about the opinion of a blogger who apparently posts without even knowing anything about his subject. I spend a lot of time doing research, some of it on the Internet. I have a whole, long list of somewhat nice tools I have come across. Most of them are things I might use occasionally. I would never even think of adding toolbars for most of them, or setting up a permanent tab in Firefox to keep them always available - I’d just clutter up my workspace. But that is exactly what I have done with Diigo - I installed their toolbar and I set up a permanent Firefox tab for them. Why? I can share bookmarks with others when I need to, but much more importantly, I can highlight, annotate, clip, and bookmark any Web content I choose, all in one central, convenient spot. Diigo is like a well-loved research notebook crammed with notes for current projects, past projects, possible future projects. Unlike most of the bookmarking “services”, I can go back to a page and see my own notes reminding me of the thought which prompted me to bookmark it. There is nothing else that even approaches it on the Web, or if there is, I haven’t heard of it. The only other social bookmarking service I consider of any real use is eSnips, which allows me to upload files for sharing with a group of my choice. Which is an entirely different feature. But, I could more easily imagine Diigo adding that functionality to their existing site than I could imagine eSnips catching up to Diigo. Personally, I hope both eSnips and Diigo survive, but if only one of them is to be a success, my vote is firmly with Diigo. As for all the other, popular social bookmarking sites out there - yes, it was a somewhat interesting idea, but they have already been left in the dust by Diigo. Calling Diigo “just another” site like the others is as absurd as it would be to label the first interstellar spaceship “just another aircraft”. Yes, I can think of features or tweaks I wish Diigo would add. But they’re just starting out. I’m sure the first interstellar spacecraft will need a few refits, too. But that’s no reason to suggest we might as well all stay on Earth and ignore the rest of the Universe. Diigo opens up a much wider universe on the Web to me, and to many others. To all of you who don’t care - enjoy being stranded in your little backwater pond as it stagnates - I will be out surfing the whole wide ocean of data out there. And I won’t waste any time worrying about you and your plight; after all, you brought it on yourselves by your apathy.

The question is: does anybody care?