For the past few months, we have been hard at work on our website revamp. What started with the intentions of mainly updating our UI, made us take a step back and really consider what Diigo has evolved into after all these years and receive feedback from our users. After getting in touch with our cherished user base, we are beginning to plan our future direction. Here is a quick overview of the incoming changes. Please note that nothing is set in stone yet, and we will continue to evaluate all feedback from our users.
When Diigo was created almost a decade ago, our goal was to provide our users with a simple platform to organize your online content and easily annotate web resources. While we have achieved these goals to some extent, we have allowed more and more features and functions to creep in along the way, resulting in an experience that may feel confusing or bloated, especially for new/casual users. Thus, we realized that we cannot clean up our UI without focusing on the functions that our users really appreciate and phasing out certain features that have strayed too far in other directions.
A major change will be our movement away from ‘social’ aspects in Diigo. While we may have been swayed by the ‘social media movement’, at the end of the day Diigo has always been more of a personal platform. The ‘Discover’ section, including ‘networks’ and ‘communities’ will eventually be phased out. This section has always been very underused, yet takes a large amount of resources to maintain. This change will also simplify user profiles, which will focus mainly on each user’s public library, removing functions such as ‘follow user’, ‘public search’ and ‘message user’. This will allow us to focus on improving Diigo’s core experience.
‘Groups’ will also be evolving to the benefit of its main users, educators and enterprises. Almost all of our active groups have been focused on education or private content sharing within corporations, so groups will be evolving into ‘Diigo Teams’, which will also add specific functionality for each usage case.
We will keep you updated on these changes as we approach our final direction, and would love to hear from you regarding these developments. Please leave your comments below or feel free to drop us a message via care@diigo.com.
Thank you for your continued support of Diigo. With your support, we can make Diigo better for you.
Diigo 
This is awesome news. I wish you guys well. With this focus, the value you provide to the market will be undeniable and it will be a tool almost anyone would want!
Sounds good! You guys are the only ones doing annotation and bookmarking the way you do, and that is sooo good and needed! Keep up the good work! Can’t wait for the update!
I am getting ready to launch some new groups on Diigo after a long absence. Will my existing groups/teams lose functionality?
Thanks for your support!
Thanks for your support!
They will not lose functionality. However, they will eventually be evovled into an improved form.
What type of issue are you having? Please drop us a note at care@diigo.com if you need assistance.
Are you saying your focus will be education and corporate users as opposed to individuals.? I do not use the social functions so that is good but I do not work in a corporation or education. I have a Monthly Professional membership but since the elimination of lists I have most of my work on Pearlltrees.
Bravo! Diigo has remained my must-have tool for tagging, annotating and saving must-remember content. And I use it frequently to share content with teams in my company. Your renewed focus on these features gets a big “huzzah” from me. And I’ll keep telling everyone I can that Diigo is a must-use tool.
Thank you for your support!
The focus for ‘groups’ moving forward will be on educational and corporate users, although some functionality will be available for personal users. Diigo will remain focused on individual users and aim to improve those aspects moving forward.
I’m thrilled that you’ve decided to update and enhance existing functionality, i.e., annotation and flexible organization, areas where Diigo shines above other tools. Firefox add-on (last updated over 3 years ago?) would be much appreciated. So would a more robust and capable Android app.
Yes, please do drop the “social aspect” — I will not miss it one bit.
Thanks for your input. We do have plans to improve the functionality of our Firefox and Safari extensions to match our Chrome plugin features.
Thanks for your input! The Firefox extension is on our list.
Wow, I have just joined Diigo and I am much inspired by the services here. The news of improvements is really encouraging. wondeful
“When Diigo was created almost a decade ago, our goal was to provide our users with a simple platform to organize your online content and easily annotate web resources.”
Just do it and make it a more and more easy and consistent cross platform experience. Of course search, organize and analyze our libraries should be at top level.
Your service is something one would really like to pay for, but then hold on considering its almost confusing organization and the sensation that it will change its DNA tomorrow or disappear.
Our bookmarks and annotations are the value for us, we don’t want to miss or lose.
I’ve never used the “social” part of Diigo, so go ahead and focus on your core service. I would like to see Diigo full support for mobile devices. Being able to annotate pdfs from my iPad would be great.
These are features that we are working on or improving in our revamp. Thanks for your input!
I just joined Diigo for the collection and annotation of PDFs/sites that I use for research/etc. A major bonus point was the way Diigo collected my highlights and annotations on the side of each PDF. Now that I am using it I few challenges a) Can I export this so I can read all of my highlights and notes (into outliner?). b) Even when reading the sidebar, there is no way to expand to see my actual notes. I was excited about this feature to review reports and paper without rereading the entire thing–just my highlights. Am I missing something to make this work better?
Great to hear. I love the bookmarking features, and was saddened when lists were replaced with outliners (terrible). Please bring lists back!
We are addressing some of these features in our product renovation that should be out soon. Please check back for updates. Thanks for your input!
I love Diigo for groups but admit I used it in mostly professional and educational contexts. One thing I don’t want to lose is the ability to share my annotations via email and links. The ability to send a link with embedded highlights or an email that had all my highlights included in the text of an email was invaluable when I needed a shortcut to make a point or share my research with others without having to create an explicit group.
Thanks!
The feature to share you links and annotations through links will be kept and improved on soon. Thanks for your input and support!
This is Awesome news. You guys are the only ones doing annotation and bookmarking the way you do, and that is so good and needed! Keep up the good work! Can’t wait for the update!
This is awesome news.I love Diigo for groups but admit I used it in mostly professional and educational contexts.Keep up the good work! Can’t wait for the update!
I just switched from Instapaper to Diigo, Diigo provide better bookmark and annotation feature, I love it.
The only problem I have with Diigo for now, is the weaker “Read Later” feature, on both website and mobile app:
1. Diigo doesn’t remember the last article I read.
2. Diigo doesn’t remember the last read position in an article I left last time.
On mobile app, it’s worse. On mobile app nowadays, we expect to return to the exact same screen when we come back to the app, even the app was killed and relaunched. If it’s harder to provide these 2 features on website, it’s actually quite easy to do in the mobile app, to some level, I consider it lazy. As long as it can go back to the same article and same position I was reading before I left, I’m happy.
This is awesome news. I wish you guys well.
I just recently signed up with Diigo and was loving everything I saw, until I clicked on “Preview the new Diigo”. That’s when I saw the ultra-low-contrast text there for the expanded note fields. To me, an older person with not-the-best vision, it is virtually unreadable. I don’t know why so many websites are jumping on this bandwagon, because it is a barrier to use by many of us. Could you please have your design team read this article (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/) and reconsider this approach? Thank you.
Thank you for your input Mike. This is definately an issue that we will review before going live. Our goal is to make the best product for all types of users and you have brought up an important factor in reaching this goal.
I’m thrilled that you’ve decided to update and enhance existing functionality, i.e., annotation and flexible organization. i wish u guys did a good job. keep sharing..!!
I’m thrilled that you’ve decided to update and enhance existing functionality, i.e., annotation and flexible organization, areas where Diigo shines above other tools. Firefox add-on (last updated over 3 years ago?) would be much appreciated. So would a more robust and capable Android app.
Those are both points that we are working on. Please check in for updates. Thanks for you support!
will the social aspect stay? the social part of the tool is great for student collaborative research group work as well as individual research. We promote this tool because it has the social/collaborative component. We did not highlight this tool this year because of this Blog post. Thought I would ask to clarify.
thanks