Diigo
December 19th, 2005
I’ve had the opportunity to try out a new social-bookmarking tool called Diigo. It’s in closed beta, but they sent me an invite after I begged (well, asked politely) for one. Also, since Diigo is not open to everyone, I asked permission to post this review.
Diigo allows users to bookmark, share, and discover new resources via tagging. Sounds familiar right? Well, it is similar to other tools, but with added features. First, it has a killer toolbar (Firefox, IE, and Flock[!]) that allows for easy bookmarking/tagging and forwarding to friends. If more than one person has publicly tagged the site and made a few comments, it will show up in the pop-up box provided.
You can also import the bookmarks that you already have stored in IE or Firefox and tag each one as needed. The toolbar also comes with a search feature that allows you to search your own bookmarks (or other users). Also, built in, is the ability to search many other search services (there’s tons of them - blog search, shopping, web - and you can create your own [although I has bit of difficulty figuring out how]).
Of course, the usual stuff is there too. Grabbing the RSS feed for specialized tags, and more; but there is a lot more to play with. Diigo will cache every page bookmarked and these can be viewed as link outs right from the service. This way, you can see a page as you remember seeing it (lovely). Also, easily copy bookmarks from others lists into your account with one easy click using the “copy this” button. If you’re not into RSS tags for keywords, just use the Diigo subscribe button and you can read content from all of your favorite tags right in the browser.
Last, and one of my favorite features, is the “expand” button after located after each tag which provides all commentary on each tagged item.
The one thing missing from Diigo that I would like to see is a social networking feature. I’ve mentioned this to many companies whose products I review. Allow me to see only my friends subscriptions, but also let me rate specific tags as more important to me as others. I trust Bill (made up name for these purposes) on these topics so show me these items first. Or, in my opinion, Jill has the best tags on bowling so send me her bowling stuff via IM because I want to know exactly when she tags something dealing with bowling.
Rating systems are very hot right now (Digg, Reddit as examples) and if we build these into our social software tools with trusted contacts, a killer app will emerge. Again, one of the needs is a user base. If Diigo can build a following, it should shine in a very crowded market.