Since I discovered Diigo, I’ve used it with nearly every page that I’ve visited, and recommended it to most of my friends. Contrary to all the other social bookmarking services, with Diigo, the focus is on the information, not the URL. At the same time, it doesn’t disconnect the information from its source. You can go back to any of the highlights you’ve saved, and view them in the original context. I use it to save anything, from short sentences to inspiring paragraphs, all the way to complete articles. And I don’t need to worry about the page changing, or the website going down. Diigo saves it all for me. As others noted, it serves as both a business tool and a personal tool. You are welcome to enjoy all the information I’ve collected, and to collaborate with me there.

dead.licious version 1.2 was just released today, with support for Ma.gnolia collections, so if you’re on a Mac and want to check for dead bookmarks, you can find it at macupdate.com.

Lack of time, mostly.

I’ll take a closer look.

Best regards
 -Ismael

How come you did not take a closer look at BlinkList? We are ranked above most of the players that you looked at, and are actively developing the platform all the time. I would love to hear your thoughts if you get a chance to check it out.

-Mike

First, there is a rather significant and little known entry that I believe was omitted. Surprisingly, it is EarthLink. I tried the service and liked it very much, but page refreshes took forever when selecting my different tags, and I quickly gave up on it and returned to del.icio.us. That was when it first came out, perhaps it has improved since then. Otherwise I actually liked it better than del.icio.us (at least at that time).

I’ve given quick runs of a number of services, and have stuck with del.icio.us. Too many of the other services do not seem to provide a condensed list view, and the last thing I want is only see 20 bookmarks on a page with long descriptions next to each bookmark, when all I want to do is quickly surf.

But now that del.icio.us has very powerful integration with Firefox, it’s a no-brainer for me. I strongly recommend that anyone that is not using the more powerful Firefox extension checks it out. It offers completely transparent integration right into the browser, and synchronizes across browsers. I do not think I have even visited the del.icio.us site in months.

I’ll join Puneet in sending out invitations, but mine will be for Simpy and its Groups feature. Do Simpy Groups provide you with that workgroup functionality you are waiting for from Diigo? Have you checked out Simpy’s Watchlist and, more importantly (IMHO), Watchlist Filters? Think of them as saved searches that filter out uninteresting stuff, and keep the stuff you are interested by. I’d love to get some feedback, if you have a few spare minutes.

And by the way, you can also play around with Simpy without creating an account, just use the demo account. It’s read-only, so you won’t be able to create Groups, but it should give you an idea about what’s available.

We’d like to welcome you to try Connectbeam. I would personally be very interested in hearing your feedback.

Reading through your comments, it seems to me that Diigo is getting close to becoming a full fledged enterprise bookmarking tool in its own right. That’s pretty good news to me, for I hate having only one player in any category I cover. Let’s see how it compares to Connectbeam and the upcoming Cogenz down the road.

Best regards
 -Ismael

I am anxiously awaiting the groups feature of Diigo. If it works as advertised, it will make Diigo a killer application for my company. It is already our personal research bookmarker. With groups, it will become a workgroup bookmarker, with the ability to collaborate in creating a bookmark set for each project. It promises to also give us flexible group definitions to support multiple, overlapping workgroups.

Since our usage is commercial, we also want privacy. The “social” nature of some sites can be a positive disadvantage for users like ours. We would also prefer a paid service; I trust a service that has a fee-based business model more than I trust a supplier that is making money by indirect means. Also, I abhor intrusive advertising and cross linking.

Having sung the praises of Diigo for our serious business application, I should add that we also use it for personal, more trivial purposes. Like sharing gift ideas, or discussing new gadgets. We used to use a private (TypePad) group blog for this, but since getting Diigo, the blog has fallen into disuse, and we tend to Diigo-annotated pages instead — note that Diigo has now become a transitive verb, like Tivo.

-Keith

Now, for a productivity drain rather than gain — but one I find useful. It may seem irrelevant, but bear with me, for it does eventually touch on the topic of bookmarking. Give the Stumbleupon Firefox plugin a try.

It is a neat piece of software where you register your interests, and then just hit the Stumble button. It delivers a random page from the Web which matches your tastes. You can then rate it (like it/dislike it), which (a) helps refine searches/delivery of releant pages and (b) helps you identify like-minded “stumblers” with whom you can share pages found. Of course, there is a lot of dross on the Web, but generally the hits have been good — serendipity in action.

Finally — and this is where this diversion is relevant, it keeps track of the pages you have visited and given a “thumbs up” rating, giving you a form of bookmarking. And no, I don’t have any vested interests in it, but yes, it is free (as in it costs nothing).

-Laurent

Thanks for sharing your experience with Diigo. Much appreciated!

Best regards
 -Ismael

That was an interesting writeup. You covered a number of sites, and offered useful capsule summaries. I’ve looked over many of the sites you mention, and used del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and Diigo. They are all good sites for bookmarking. But I think you overlooked a few points about Diigo that make it different from, and far superior to, any of the other sites.

1. As well as the ability to highlight and add sticky notes to web pages, you can collect the annotations from any set of pages (say, those tagged web-2.0-services) into a single source, with original URLs noted, to simplify your research.

2: The Diigo toolbar allows you to place all the search tools you might want, grouped by purpose, in a single button, so you can easily use multiple search tools for extensive research. The integration of this with bookmarking and annotation capabilities makes Diigo the most full-featured, capable research tool available.

Diigo has other abilities; too many to list here. Overall, Diigo will save anyone who spends much time doing research on the Internet time and effort. True, you need to spend a bit of time learning all the features so you can incorporate them into your work habits, but the effort will pay off many times over.

Overall, Diigo is the one service I find I cannot live without. There are other tools out there that do a nice job of this or that, and I use some of them. But Diigo is the only one I depend on throughout the day and could not live without.

Thanks for the detailed feedback. I added a quick review of Simpy, included the Simpy icon to my set of bookmarking icons, and removed Digg from the list. I agree with you, it does not really qualify.

Also, you might want to take a look at the features suggested by Bob.

Take care!
 -Ismael