Diigo, "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff", the web2.0 social bookmarks and annotation service, has finally announced going public today!*
I've been waiting for this to write about it, well here it goes:
Diigo is a great, no, a fantastic tool(!) Not only for bookmarking but also for research, blogging and a must for any social bookmark mania. It's a kind if mix between del.icio.us (social bookmarks), Wizlite (web highlight and notes), Onlywire (multi post to social bookmarks), with Blogging support.
Diigo vs Flock:
In fact, there are some similarities with Flock, the web 2.0 browser, though you can install Diigo on Flock you'll get some close features, like:
blogging: They both support WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad and MovableType for now (+Dupral for Flock) exempt that Diigo, instead of a blog editor, uses the online blog editor.
+ In flock you can save your post for later, in Diigo you can clip the text you want and blog from your bookmarks later on. (See an example, select all and expand to see what I mean.)
Bookmarking: Both have a one click bookmark. Flock can sync and bookmark to Shadows and deli.cio.us. Diigo's, called QuickD, let's you set a custom tag and also can simultaneous bookmark to: de.licio.us, BlinkList, Furl, Netvouz, RawSugar, Simpy, Spurl, Yahoo, locally... and of course at Diigo!
Search: They both have good search but very different. Flock can search though bookmarks, history, the web and add search plugins like in Firefox. Else Diigo let's you completely customize, add search engines and display them in one or more dropdown menus on the toolbar. (For example, I customized a part of mine for searching though social bookmarks: digg, del.icio.us popular, Netvouz, Hatena...and the same menu that will search my bookmarks.) And at the Diigo website there's an in-page pop-up advanced search which let's you search tags, url, title, phrase, in comments, in highlight or anywhere for only user's or community bookmarks.
So using both, Diigo AND Flock, makes you someone very very... social!? ;-)
Highlighting:
This is the main interesting feature in Diigo.
You may not have the Flock's RSS reader support*, nor the drag and drop Flickr or PhotoBucket toolbars but you can Clip text and images, Highlight, Web notes and Aggregate the clippings. Aggregating clippings lets you collect text on the web and later view them all on one page, very useful for research and blogging. See the screenshot.
Diigo's highlighting styles
Other special features:
A bookmark status icon on the toolbar shows if the page has been bookmarked by you, has been commented by any Diigo user or both.- Tag cloud which is also a batch tag manager. [Screenshot]
- Batch selected: Set the selected bookmarks to public/private, mark as read/un-read, expand details or delete them.
Quick access: A customizable drop down menu to quickly access any bookmarks of a certain tag.
Forward: Email link AND clipping. (usually it's just the link.)
Highlight: Search terms like the Google toolbar but also possible on bookmarks and inside non expanded clippings.- Tagging: They can be comma OR space separated!
- Delete: This is a small detail and would be better shown in a video but I love it: When you delete a bookmark it 'flies out' and disappears with a zooming effect! ...and of course it's a one click delete.
+ all the usual features, and not so usual features like: import directly from browser bookmarks and del.icio.us, follow a tag, user or search results, RSS links, Unicode support, an Ajax linkroll generator and much more... This without mentioning what's comming up! (API included!)
As you see, they have done many updates since they started in Decamber. If you want to see more there's a recent review by John from Libraryclips and very good and complete help pages with screen-shots at Diigo.
Note: The toolbar exists for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Flock, but incase you find yourself in an internet cafe, there's also an in-page bookmarklet for bookmarking and highlighting(!). All the rest, annotation, blogging... comes with it's the toolbar.
I've used, and still use now, the Diigo toolbar along many other extensions, where in the beginning it did have some compability problems, it's been a while I haven't had any.
*I want to apologise to all the diigo team for the other day with a special thanks to Maggie Tsai for her kind understanding and reaction. -Some of you may know what it is, if you don't I won't tell you. (><") ::Shame::
*Flock is working on the possibility to import from OPML.
In case, there's are regulary updated lists of over 200 ALL Social Bookmarks with their features and over 250 digg like services.
Category: Social Bookmarks Review
tags: Ajax Public Beta Startup Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking Annotation Highlight Tagging Toolbar
