Diigo.com - Public and private bookmarking service
I got an invitation to Diigo service. On a broader basis, it is a bookmarking service, but it has many more things to offer. So lets see a question and answer review of this service.
1) What is Diigo?
Diigo stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff”. It is an online bookmarking service where you can not only bookmark links, but make them available either publicly or privately (this is what was missing inDel.icio.us).
It is a free online social bookmarking and annotation service. It offers an integrated, simple-to-use platform to let you easily annotate, bookmark, share and discover online contents.
2) What all can I do with Diigo?
With Diigo, you can bookmarks, annotate, create stickies, share and discover your bookmarks with others. I think in the future we will see more than this from Diigo.
Bookmark: – You an bookmark links as you do with any other social networking site like Del.icio.us. But the difference is you can do it publicly and privately. So now one has an option of bookmarking all the links that he does not want the world to know about. You can make the bookmarks public and private at any time.
You can even add comments to the bookmarks you add to Diigo. If the link is public, others will be able to see your comments and they will be able to comment on that link as well. (Neat feature I think, but this can be misused I think ).
Ofcourse you can tag all your bookmarks. And whatever you link to Diigo is all searchable e.g. comments, links, tags, stickies, highlights etc.
You also have the facility where you can bookmark a link as ‘unread’ and then go and read it later on (it will be marked in bold characters on the site).
Annotate and Stickies: – This is one feature that I like, especially the sticky one. Although sticky notes can be made in much more better way then it is currently done I like this feature. You can highlight a sentence, a paragraph and annotate. Again this can be both public and private. There are few other things that can be done with highlighting.
You can create sticky notes for yourself and for public. There are so many times that we go to a site, like the site or some idea clicks our mind. We bookmark it and when we go to that site a week later, we find it hard to remember why in the first place we bookmarked that site. So with stickies it is easier to do so. You can both place private and public stickies (some restrictions apply). So I will call this more of “Social Annotation”.
Share: – You can share your bookmarks with others via Email (directly from within the tool or website), through RSS and allow access via the website directly. You can highlight something even email that to your friend. You can not only share bookmarks but also highlights, sticky notes and comments with others.
Discover: – You can discover what your friends are linking to by subscribing to them. You can also search and discover links and comments that might be helpful to you. Similarly you can subsribe to the tags and as a result whenever somebody else tags a links (assuming it’s public) using the “tag” word, you will see that link in your inbox (This feature is there in Del.icio.us as well).
Other Features:-
# Now you can highlight & jot down your comments directly on a webpage, and scan through all your research findings quickly.
# Easily extract and compile all your highlights across multiple pages for a given subject.
# Exchange viewpoints on any specific area of a webpage - great for collaboration or debating an issue.
Diigo is also proud of their tool and how they have integrated many search engine links within the tool. You can configure your own search engine links as well if you wish. So for example, you can search for “Tejas Patel” and click on “Bookmark” search engines and it will look for “Tejas Patel” on all the search engines configured within “Bookmark” search engine list and open the links in separate windows.
3) Right, so why should I stop using a social bookmarking site that I am already happy with?
This question comes to the mind everytime a new service comes to the market which might be offering few extra features. I had the same question until I saw the answer for myself. With Diigo, while you link
So now while you can use Diigo, you can configure the toolbar to bookmark the same link to your favourite bookmarking site as well. Now this is quite good philosoply. Now I can use this new tool without really forgetting to bookmark the same links to my old bookmarking site as well. For my I do them at Del.icio.us and my bookmarks will be registered there while I am using Diigo. So if you want to give this service a try without loosing anything, this is the way to go. Configuration is simple as well!
4) Tell me more about stickies?
I really like the idea of sticky notes, I am really big on that. I started using Mystickies couple of weeks back. Great site but as it is one or two developers working on the site, it might really take a long time before they churn out new and advanced features. Stickies allows you to make a note of why you bookmarked something or what action you want to take on that particular paragraph you have highlighted or on that particular website. You can either have private notes for yourself and your friends or you can have public sticky notes. I like the simple implementation of way stickies are created on Mystickies.com site. I like the way it’s done on Diigo as well, but I think much better can be done to simplify the process of creating stickies. To check out stickies you just have to hover over the highlighted text and you will see sticky notes there (some colorful sticky notes can definately help).
5) So how do I get started?
You will need an invite now to get started. Comment here I have few invites that I can send out to people. It’s in closed beta at this stage. Once you get the invitation and you create your user account on the site, you can download the toolbars for both IE, Firefox and Flock and you are on your way to start bookmarking. I hear that they are going to add many more interesting features to the site. Personally I think it is a great site with great potentials. If you are deep into bookmarking and heavily rely on it, then some of the features offered are definately of help and you can try this while still using other services.
6) What are the features you will like to see?
Here I can go on for ever, but here is a list of features I will like to see in no particular order.
- There is no provisioning of editing the links directly either in the toolbar nor on the website. So a feature where we can interact with the links directly would be great (OK, del.icio.us has this and it comes quite handy)
- I would really like to see a feature where we can directly create sticky notes instead of first making annotations and then creating stickies ( I can sure think of 5 good reasons to do this).
- I should be able to import existing bookmarks from other services like Del.icio.us etc.
- There should be a feature where I can delete my profile completely when I need to (this is really important with social networking sites I think)
- The product has many good features, make the UI in a way that they become more intuitive so people get the most out of it.
Overall I am impressed with the product and hope that it gets better soon. One thing that I keep thinking on while trying new products is that there are so many products coming out that it’s difficult to keep up with them. It’s also hard to migrate to new service every now and then. But you got to stop when you think your purpose is fulfilled in whatever service you are using. Move on and bother yourself if you think that you got two good reasons to move to another service.
Good luck to people involved with Diigo as well. Looks like a great product.


