It's all about discovery and Diigo has done a great job in this area.

Today Diigo released version 3 of their research and collaboration tool. I can describe it in one word - WOW!!! I’ve been a great fan of this social bookmarking system for quite a while, but this upgrade puts Diigo into a league of its own. The Diigo staff have made their platform a researcher’s dream. There’s a new browser toolbar, a new user dashboard, upgraded groups, expanded user profiles, a new comment wall and a platform-specific messaging system.

なんか、新しくなったDiigoは、かなりソーシャルになっていきそう。実は、放置のBloggerに自動投稿したり、さまざまなDiigoらし い基本機能はV2の頃からあったのだけど、今回かなりわかりやく、使いやすくなっている。これがソーシャルには必須なのかもしれないですね。

The point here is, Diigo is not really a bookmarking site. The essence of this tool is research and secondarily productive community.

Diigo v3 places more emphasis on the social aspect of social bookmarking through merging ideas from several different sites together. For example, it takes annotating from Clipmarks, bookmarking from del.icio.us and a facility which suggests websites you may like based on your annotations from StumbleUpon.

Diigo v3 has some unique features which I like. When you are on websites, you can view what other users have highlighted and annotated which is useful for group projects where collaboration is necessary. You can also join groups and communities and send private messages to other users. Another interesting feature is WebSlides which lets you view your bookmarks as a slideshow which is useful if you can’t always remember the name of the site but you can remember the way it looks!

Diigo es una herramienta esencial para el educador y el estudiante 2.0.

The service has also added a recommendation engine. Since users are constantly saving and tagging web content, Diigo has a huge database of web pages that may feature similar content. So if you like pages about Windows freeware, Diigo probably knows that and when you click on the recommendations feed you should be able to find pages that you'll like.

Check out this quick demo video about Diigo v3 and find out just what it can do. Please note though, this video surprisingly showcased a screen-shot of TechCrunch and not SOMEWHAT FRANK - there must be some sort of mix up. :)  Nonetheless, Diigo v3 is pretty impressive. I like the way that Diigo enables users to create lists of bookmarks that can then be viewed a number of different ways (list views, web slide view, etc). I also like its bookmarking toolset as it offers a number of innovative ways to capture and annotate content.

Interestingly, Ren points out Delicious as the only competitor to his service that’s still innovating. However, it looks like traffic to Delicious is falling off, while StumbleUpon has spiked upward according to Alexa, Compete and Quantcast (click through for the charts). That may mean that the average user is actually interested in a less full-featured service. Around the corner is Delicious 2.0 (coverage on that from TechCrunch), so we’ll soon have a chance to see.

I recommend Diigo, especially with the plug-in. It's a complex tool but if you take a few minutes to learn what it can do and how it does it, it can make you a more productive, smarter Web user.

There's also a very nice new browser sidebar that shows you a lot of very useful and focused information, including your own latest bookmarks, those from your Diigo friends, and most cleverly, the Diigo users who have also saved information from the page you're visiting as well as the site itself.