Diigo V4 launches today!  Needlessly to say, we are excited that V4 finally gets to say hello to the world!

In our passion to make Diigo the best in its class, we’ve added features, completely revamped the user interfaces, made existing features even easier to use, and come up with what we think you’ll find is an even more incredible platform than before.  Before we give you a peek at all Diigo now has to offer, though,  the entire Diigo team wants to express our most sincere thanks to each and every one of our users and fans, especially those who helped so much in our beta testing phase, for your time, help, encouragement, suggestions, ideas, and yes, bug reports to help us shape Diigo where it is today.  So, in a very real sense, all of you who take an interest in Diigo are a valuable part of the Diigo team, and you have as much reason to be proud of today’s launch of Version 4 as we do.

Thank you, Diigo Community!

Diigo V4 represents Diigo’s continuous effort and commitment to make Diigo the premium online research tool.  As many of you know, Diigo is not merely just another social bookmarking service or a web markup tool. We are developing Diigo to address our personal pain and to help users to better manage the process of discovering, processing, managing, and sharing online information more productively and effectively, so all the features are carefully thought out and seamlessly integrated with personal and team collaboration productivity in mind. We are passionate about making Diigo the best knowledge gathering and sharing platform for individuals, work groups, and companies, organizations, and educators alike.  And we are continuing our relentless pursuit of being a leading innovator in the space and making Diigo the best it can be!

So, what’s new in V4 (click to learn more)?   Building upon the strengths of Diigo V3, version 4 adds significant features, usability and flexibility:

• New user interface — Users of version 4 enjoy an all-new web interface that reinforces Diigo as a powerful personal and team research tool. The three main areas — My Library, My Network and My Groups — relate to the key value propositions of Diigo: Research, Sharing, and Collaboration.  New display options — compact, standard and power edit — also make the rich feature set more easily accessible.

• Snapshots on demand — The established approach to bookmarking is complemented by Diigo’s version 4’s new archiving capability to capture and archive entire web pages — even dynamic and password-protected content. For each snapshot requested (using the full Diigo toolbar in Firefox or Internet Explorer), an HTML version and screenshot are added to the user’s library, and all available versions are presented on a timeline.  This is like building a personal wayback machine of important webpages.   Some examples of uses for this new features are:  archiving of online receipts, promotional ads, client media outreach (for marketing and PR) archiving and reporting, and a wide range of time-progressive reporting of online data.

• Improved search — Users now have a vastly improved search utility, which allows them to toggle between several modes in their libraries. Filtering by tags gives the most specific results, but users can also search by full text, by a combination of criteria (tags, annotations, and URL), or perform advanced searches with custom criteria. For more advanced searches, ten criteria are available. All in all, a highly effective toolset for finding data in Diigo — quickly!

• Improved Annotations features and user interface – A new function allows users to turn their mouse pointer into a highlighting pen, which is now available in multiple colors so that groups or individual paragraphs can be easily differentiated. Also, improved icons for annotations, improved view annotation filters, and a new highlight menu, provide greater flexibility for Diigo users who prefer a custom approach to sticky notes.

• Simple, powerful, learning networks — Users of Diigo 4 benefit from a streamlined and highly effective approach to bookmark-oriented networking with friends, collaborators and other people of interest. The old two-way approach to establishing a relationship is replaced by a single action: Follow. Within the resulting Network, a flow of bookmarks — including your own — provides a close to real-time view of the activities and interests of these people. Creation or annotation of any bookmark causes it to rise to the forefront in all associated networks. In any person’s network — not just your own — you can preview, filter by tag, add comments and more.

• Group knowledge repositories and discussions — Version 4 greatly increases the capabilities of the Diigo platform for group knowledge and collaboration. Integration, filters, sort options, greatly improved support for tags, highly focused search results, group snapshots and other refinements make Diigo group work both productive and enjoyable.

For instance: imagine a group of corporate head hunters looking for job candidates on social networks. These Web “snapshots” can be gathered (even from behind passworded profiles) to aggregate a graphical list of candidates with their qualifications and etc.

• Diigo meta — Annotated preview, bookmarking history with per-user tags, highlights and sticky notes, personal annotations, public annotations, public comments, tag cloud, and more. The Meta page appears by default when you browse the library of any other user. Other routes to Diigo Meta include the Share menu and the Snapshots page for a bookmark.

• iPhone® application — users can now access their Diigo libraries from the iPhone and iPod touch®, plus download for offline browsing! (Coming soon ~ pending approval by App Store)

• Other improvements — Diigo 4 brings a wide range of additional improvements including multi-word tagging, improved tag editing, smarter approaches to moderation, plus lots more!  We will try to highlight and showcase many of the new changes in future posts.

This version 4 release of Diigo is a substantial step towards making our service the premier web-based research tool. The collective power ingrained in the Diigo platform to collect, organize, archive, and share knowledge and process like never before, is now improved dramatically and positions Diigo and its users at the threshold of a new collaborative research and knowledge age.

Whether you are a consumer researching products to buy, an individual investor researching stocks on the Internet, a teacher gathering materials, a student group collecting information for a group project, a PR professional collecting client-relevant information, a recruiter scouting for talent, or a workgroup staying on top of competitive intelligence, Diigo can dramatically improve your productivity.

There is a lot to explore in the new Diigo. So make sure you check out our new Take A Tour (complete with V4 tutorial overviews), install the latest toolbar, and of course, delve into the new site.  You can also check out our new Help section (note:  new HELP is still under active construction.  If you’d like to help, love to hear from you!), or come join us in our user forum.  Ah, bugs reporting – we’ve tried hard to test through the system as thoroughly as possible.  Please do let us know if we have overlooked something. Also, let us know your first impression, likes / dislikes, feedback and suggestion. Lastly, if you like what you see, make sure to help us spread the word!

That’s it for now. Enjoy! And thank you for your continued support to help us make Diigo better and better!

Sincerely,
The entire Diigo team