Diigo, where information, knowledge and community come together, is essentially two services in one. Its primary function is being a social bookmarking service. However, because people are relatively definable by what they read and bookmark, Diigo also integrated a social networking platform that allows users to find and interact with others with similar interests.
As a social bookmarking service it offers many features that other popular bookmarking services provide, such as easy tagging from the toolbar, recommended tags, and search capabilities. But Diigo goes further, allowing users to highlight and comment directly on web pages, and it allows users to organize tagged features into an interactive list. This list is then played as a slideshow with one mouse click.
Diigo makes social bookmarking truly Web 2.0 with social search and networking based on an individual’s tags, bookmarks and annotations. Diigo will also recommend bookmarks and other Diigo users that share similar interests. Additionally, users can see what content their friends have bookmarked and commented on, and Diigo even pulls out the bookmarks and groups for which you share a common interest.
Buzz Meter Ranking: 3 out of 4 Buzz Bees
Positive: The interactive slideshow is a useful feature. It allows retrieving and sharing online research, including highlights and annotations, effortlessly. After importing tags from other bookmarking sites, or starting from scratch, users can easily send and share messages and content, join groups of interest, meet and collaborate with others, participate in forums, and view current hot topics. All this – along with Diigo’s advanced search capabilities – makes finding, discussing and sharing online content a breeze. Additionally, keep your eye out for the version of Diggo, which should be hitting the Web in the next couple of weeks.
A few of the features to look for include: A major UI change, more intuitive design, improved search and cache feature, the ability to upload screenshots for your bookmarks, and improved user interaction.
Negative: Del.icio.us generally is the first social bookmarker people think of. As a result, Delicious organizes more tags and information. For example, a Del.icio.us search for soccer generates 65,660 bookmarks, and the same search on Diigo generates 706 results. Additionally, Diigo, though it recommends similar tags, does not intuitively include them in a search. For example, a search for soccer does not intuitively include futbol unless a post is tagged both soccer and futbol.
Conclusion: When it comes to bookmarking, Diigo clearly offers a number of useful features not found on other bookmarking services. And having the additional social aspect provides users with a great user experience and improves search. All this makes transferring your bookmarks to Diigo a smart idea. However, because much of the power of a social bookmarking site is in how much data has been bookmarked and organized, until more people convert to Diigo, it will not be the most useful bookmarking search tool available.
I began experimenting with Diigo about 4 months ago. I liked it a lot but couldn’t find a reason to incorporate it into an everyday routine. I’m going to go back and take another look :). Thanks!
Thanks, Stuart. I think you’ll find Diigo really useful, especially for highlighting the content you’ve bookmarked and using the annotations. I also like that you can categorize bookmarks as read or unread. I’m looking forward to the expected updates coming in the next couple of weeks as well.