Diigo

(By [|David Pierce])

I’ve used [|Delicious] for a long time to manage my Web bookmarks. It was easy to use, accessible from any browser, and worked well with Firefox. For all my needs, it was a great bookmarking service. 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
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. With Diigo, you can highlight the page you’re bookmarking, and then later view the page with highlights, or just the highlights themselves. No more searching through the page again to find what it was you cared about.

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
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
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. You don’t have to perfectly tag everything, because every word on every page you bookmark is totally searchable. 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?