Diigo Review Part II-- Bookmarking is more then bookmarking now.

I reviewed and wrote about Diigo when I got my hands on an invite earlier. Since I wrote that review, been using Diigo on the side along with using Del.icio.us. Things are definitely been on the rapid improving end since that time.

I have been in constant touch with Maggie Tsai from Diigo and kept on hammering her with my view, ideas and complaint about what more can be done about Diigo. They seem to have a vision and have some great plans with Diigo as I see it.

When I talk about social bookmarking tools and talk about services such as Del.icio.us, Wink and Diigo, people ask me what exactly is this service for and one word answer is it is a “bookmarking service” which is up on the Internet. But thinking about it, I don’t think that it’s only about bookmarking now. I see online/social bookmarking completely different now. Social bookmarking not only lets you bookmark your internet readings and findings, but also lets you track your journey on the Internet. By looking at personal bookmarking page on such services, one can not only track what all sites have interested him over the time, but much more. One can do some analysis of all the sites a person visits over time and bookmarks it and see how a person’s focus and interest has changed over time. By constantly monitoring the personalised bookmarking page of a person, one will be able to find as to where the person is focusing these days. Scary ehh.., it sure is for me.

Of course using sites such as Del.icio.us has also proved to be a great social bookmarking sites. Using and searching by tags people can now find more interesting and useful links then ever. This definitely keeps the geeks more informed! You now don’t have to work as hard as finding things, as someone else would have already found it and tagged and bookmarked it.

So how is Diigo helping me achieve all the above mentioned points? I think it’s doing it in a great way and offers much more flexibility compared to the other tools available (if they are available, I might not have used them).Going on the same lines as my previous review of Diigo, lets recap some of it’s capabilities again: -

1. Social Bookmarking: – Same with most other bookmarking sites. It lets you bookmark links and make it available for other people to use it along with searchable tags. More then this when using Diigo browser extensions, you can configure the extension to bookmark it to other favourite social bookmarking sites along with Diigo. So this is a win win situation, you use Diigo, while still maintaining a copy of your bookmarks at other sites.

2. Private Bookmarks: – Del.icio.us came to a huge success because of it’s social and open nature, but there are times when I want to bookmark links and keep it private. So for such times, we should have the feature of private bookmarking which Diigo offers and we can switch between making a bookmark private and public anytime. This is one feature where Del.icio.us is lagging behind for a long time now and ya I do remember it complaining it all the time about this too.

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3. Annotations, Comments & Stickies: – You can make private and public annotations on your bookmarks. You can also add comments to the links that you bookmark or you when seeing bookmarks from other people. This is a great feature I think. This feature helps a lot in community sharing. With highlights and annotations on the web page, you can do it privately and publicy as well. Sticky is a great feature when you want to bookmark a site and want to remember what exactly you bookmarked that site and then you can highlight multiple

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4. Toolbar: – Diigo Toolbar itself includes many good features namely meta search and customisable search engines (try out the Diigo Firefox Extension to see what I mean). It includes other features like Subscription links (depending on the filter, links from your subscribed tags/user names will show up here),Inbox and QuickD (where you can just hit the button and the link will be bookmarked without any pop-ups on your screen) and few other option. Also, if you have bookmarked or highlighted any section of a web site, the next time you visit the same page, you will be able to see the highlight and the toolbar will show up that the page is already bookmarked (you can change the behaviour of this). Toolbar also offers the facility where you can directly email links from within along with annotations if preferred.

 

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5. Web site: – Diigo web site also offers some easy to use functionality and I am hoping that they will add more functionality in the future. One of the recently added functionality I like is that of advanced search and adding of tags (you can right click tags and start editing the tags). Also a recently added feature is importing bookmarks from Del.icio.us. They have also added the feature of linkroll.

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Overall, I am impressed with Diigo and with more focused features and more adaptation it can go a long way. If for not anything else, I can just use Diigo for it’s three key features namely, multiple highlights (Del.icio.us fails on this one), sticky ntoes and private bookmarking. This features can not only increase my productivity but also don’t have to use multiple bookmarking and note taking software/services.