Diigo actually seems to have a clear purpose, unlike many of its competitors. Diigo isn't a direct competitor of del.icio.us or any of the other social bookmarking sites. Rather, Diigo is claiming that it is a social annotation service. There are several tools floating around that allow you to merge your own local content with content delivered from a website to create your own custom experience for that particular URL (Grease Monkey comes to mind).
The basic premise behind Diigo is that you go about your business on the Web, probably doing research and looking up information for a particular task. If you find something of interest on a page, instead of blindly bookmarking the entire page, you can highlight some important piece of the page and bookmark that page, also leaving the highlight intact. The next time you return to that page, Diigo will detect that you have been there and will actually re-activate the highlight you created previously.
In addition to the highlighting functionality, you can leave and browse page-wide comments and you can create Sticky Notes, which are little boxes of text that appear next to highlighted text. I recently put this feature to good use. I was reading an MSDN article on something related to WCF (an article by Juval Lowy, I believe) when I noticed that it was out of date. The code in the article was written for the May CTP of .NET Framework 3.0 - so I highlighted the code that would break under the current CTP and left a public stickynote containing the updated code. Anyone using Diigo who browsed to that page would then have the ability to see the code I highlighted and see the sticky note I left with the fixed code.
When I first tried Diigo out last week, it was riddled with bugs. The sticky notes only stored like 40 characters of text, making them completely worthless. The wizard to import bookmarks from del.icio.us was completely non-functional. I am just as much a proponent of the perpetual beta as the next guy, but I was really dissappointed when a site that was supposedly "live" and "running" contained so many showstopping bugs. I retested all of that functionality this morning and thankfully it all works..There are still some hiccups, but it is at least functioning.
The Diigo functionality is incredibly useful... but it has fallen into the same trap that so many sites fall into. I don't think Diigo has properly targeted their audience. Surely, thousands upon thousands of people will be using this and will find it extremely useful, but I think the people who need this functionality most will be unable to participate in it. What I really want is to be able to browse around the internet. As I find really informational stuff, I want to be able to blindly bookmark an entire page. However, I also want to be able to highlight and do sticky notes... but I do not want the rest of the Internet to see my research notes. What I really want is the members of my research team to see my research notes. What Diigo is missing is the ability to limit my tagged and annotated research to my buddies, or to a named group of people. In reality what I truly want is a version of Diigo that runs within the enterprise - my annotations are stored privately within my organization and only those people with accounts on my enterprise social annotation server would then have access to the highlights, bookmarks, sticky notes, page discussions, and page comments.
Until I have that kind of functionality, sites like Diigo will continue to be nothing more than a novelty to me. As I said, there are thousands of people for whom Diigo is the perfect match of functionality versus need. But for me, I need something more secure, more tightly constrained; something that is designed to work within the enterprise to increase the productivity of my team at the office. I couldn't care less about increasing the productivity of the overall community at large.
Overall, I give Diigo 3 stars out of 5. Add enterprise features and its up to a 4 - change the GUI so it actually looks appealing instead of the disorganized muck that it renders now, and it will be a 5 out of 5. To compare, I give del.icio.us 1 star. The only reason it gets a single star is because its currently got the biggest market share of social bookmarking. Being able to suck my bookmarks out of del.icio.us and put them somewhere else is a pre-requisite for any newcomer to the social bookmarking world.
p.s. The other thing that makes Diigo a little more brittle than it could be is that you are annotating selected text on live sites. What happens if the orientation of the text changes, if the words change, or if the page itself is changed or renamed? The source of the highlighting that created the annotation will be lost. Hopefully Diigo demotes the highlights and sticky notes to page-wide comments when the original source can't be located.tags: web20 socialsoftware socialannotation research bookmarking tagging diigo review
links: digg this del.icio.us technorati reddit
1. Our group function will be released before xmas. so u can share you own
stuff with your group member.
2. We also cache the page which u highlight. if the page was gone. u can
still access it on our server.
:)
