Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Then I found Diigo, and suddenly Delicious didn’t look so good anymore. Diigo is another social bookmarking service (and one we’ve covered before), offering all of Delicious’ relevant features and much more. I left Delicious, and haven’t ever looked back. There are a lot of things I love about Diigo, but there are seven features that sold me on using Diigo for all my bookmarking needs. These are all in addition to the features I deem non-negotiable for social bookmarking sites- tagging, Firefox extensions, looking at popular bookmarks, etc.

1. Highlighting

2. Saving Pages is Easier Than Ever, Regardless of Browser

If you’re using Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Flock, the Diigo toolbar has all the features you could want - bookmark, search, highlight, and organize all your Web pages right from the toolbar. If you’re not into those browsers, though there’s a great bookmarklet that lets you do most of that with any browser. I use Chrome, and all the functionality I need is built right into the bookmarklet. Delicious becomes more difficult to use outside of Firefox (there are bookmarklets, but they pale in comparison), and Diigo keeps on working fine.

3. Functional Commenting and Real Conversations

This is one of my favorite features of Diigo - when you’re reading a page, you can make comments right on the page, that show up as speech bubbles. If another Diigo user comes across the page, they’ll be able to see your comment. You can see (in the Firefox sidebar) who’s reading a page you’re on, who’s talking about it, and a real conversation can happen - unlike in Delicious, when all you can see is someone’s bookmarks.

4. Send Bookmarks to Facebook or Twitter with one click

With one click, you can send a Diigo bookmark to Twitter, Facebook, or your blog. It truly takes one click, from “Send” to the service you want to use. If you want to send bookmarks to Facebook, you’ll have to install the Diigo Facebook app. You can also have Diigo create a daily digest of your latest bookmarks and send it to your blog, which I’d debate the usefulness of, but the functionality is there. Being able to bookmark a site on Twitter in particular straight from Diigo is big for me, and makes Twitter easier and quicker to use.

5. Sites Help You Find Deeper Cuts

When you bookmark a page with Diigo, it bookmarks more than just the link (like those other sites). It bookmarks the entire page you were on, which has two great implications. First, it means you can preview sites within the Diigo page. You can view your bookmarked page, without ever leaving Diigo. It also means that you can search the full text of pages you bookmark.

Your bookmarks live in Diigo, so if a site goes down or is unavailable, you can still find it in Diigo, as well as search and view it. Diigo’s become a social-bookmarking machine, and I left Delicious and never looked back. If you want to make the switch, you can import your bookmarks from most other services- making the switch is so easy, there’s no reason not to! Diigo’s the new gold standard in social bookmarks. Do you use social bookmarking services? Which one? What are the killer features that make you use the one you’ve got?

I’m a big YouTube fan, but there are way more videos than I can possibly figure out. With “Sites“, you’re able to go through a particular site (including MakeUseOf) and find out what other people are bookmarking and reading about. You can create a watchlist, and whenever someone bookmarks a page from that site, you see it. It’s a great way to find popular and cool stuff in big, content-full sites that you might not notice otherwise.

6. Simultaneously bookmark things to Diigo and Elsewhere - even Delicious! If you have a Ma.gnolia, Delicious, or Simpy account that you want to hold on to for posterity, you can set up Diigo to simultaneously bookmark pages to Diigo and to your other service, using the “Save Elsewhere” feature. I like this because it means you can use the vastly superior Diigo, but for all four different services. Just enter your account info, and you can start bookmarking all over the Web, with one click!

7. Bookmark and Search Entire Web Pages

I seem to always bookmark a page, and then come back to it later and forget what it was that I cared about on the page

No more searching through the page again to find what it was you cared about.

Diigo = “delicious on steroids” with more annotations or conversations, sticky notes. More social community.

“Increased engagement = Opportunity for Increased Learning” Engagement is the why for these tools

Annotations on sites helps information literacy.

Other Stuff: del.icio.us is so barebones that there's not much else it offers. Google Notebook's advantages are all outlined above but are held to some degree by Diigo, though Google does hold out the possibility of superior future integration with its other products. In contrast, Diigo's additional features abound. You can include a linkroll of Diigo bookmarks on your blog/website that includes your comments on webpages when people click on the links from your linkroll. Diigo also updates del.icio.us with all of the bookmarks added to Diigo, so you do not lose any of the benefits of the del.icio.us community. In addition, Diigo can automatically post to your blog based on the sites you've bookmarked and commented on. Winner: Diigo

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?

Features of Diigo As a personal research tool, you can use Diigo to, Bookmark, highlight texts and add sticky notes to any websites that you want. All changes are persistent - that means you can see the same highlighted texts when you are browsing through the same page again.

As a collaborative research platform, you can use Diigo to, Join or create a private or public group to share and collaborate with people of the same interests. Add private sticky notes that are visible to only members of the same group. This creates a platform for instant discussion (or debate!)

Group a web page with tags and lists. Access all your research anywhere because all your bookmarks are stored online. Search for a bookmark by a full text search, sticky notes, tags and more. Share your research with others in multiple ways - send to blog, linkrolls, tagrolls, by email, post to other social bookmarking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc. Automatically post findings to your blog with all the comments, highlights, etc. Easily find the most popular content on Diigo to stay up to date with the hottest news. Get recommended content based on your activities in Diigo. Get related content while browsing the Internet - I recently stumbled a website with loads of useful comments from Diigo’s users. Import bookmarks from other social bookmarking sites to Diigo. The “Save Elsewhere ” feature allows you to simultaneously bookmark sites to Del.ico.us, Simpy or Ma.gnolia.

Group tag - to enforce tagging consistency within a group, the group admin can set a list of recommended tags to be used by other team members. Get recommended news from your Diigo’s friends - from Diigo’s sidebar, you can also see who is currently reading the same page too!

Extract comments / notes by other users on a website.

After testing Diigo for a while, I love the fact that Diigo maintains all the annotations and comments that I’ve previously left on a web page, which speeds up future revisions on all of my previous findings. Furthermore, there are many specific public groups to join that will definitely help to expand my knowledge.

Diigo, in my opinion, is not only an online research tool; it is a living knowledge sharing community.