Diigo has been an “interesting playground” for us and our community members. It’s been lots of fun focusing on creating Diigo packed with lots of cool and advanced features set that we would love to have as users ourselves 🙂 Of course, with help from our community members, we’ve also been listening to them and trying to incorporate lots of their valuable feedback in our feature development.

Thought to share several user testimonials we’ve received recently. Thanks, everyone for your kind words and continued support! Please continue to share with us your “must-have” and “cool-to-have” wishlists.

“Diigo has an amazing array of features. I never thought anything could replace NeedleSearch, but Diigo’s Search is better and easier to configure. Diigo is worth installing for this alone, but there is so much more. Just install it and play with it. And, if you are thinking, “Not another toolbar!”, a nice thing about Diigo is that it doesn’t demand its own space. You can use all or part, and you can put the components where you like. Also has full-featured context menu.”
— Godfrey Daniel

” great extensions. Packed with useful features. Many thanks.”
— Max

“Better than google toolbar!

I have not tried the highlight stuff yet. but I really love the search box. I used to use google toolbar – better than firefoxs’ own — since I can do word find and highlight without re-entering the search words. But diigo’s search box is even better – I can do everything that google toolbar allow me to do, and it is custmizable!”
— Eric Ham

“I’ve been using Diigo for a while now, and it has gradually replaced both del.icio.us and the built-in firefox bookmark feature as my favorite bookmark utility. Definitely worth trying, I can’t live without it ;-).”
— Joseph Wilkinson

“I must admit I wasn’t quite certain whether I really wanted to install a new toolbar. But my friend recommended it to me. Boy, am I glad, once you start to play with it, it’s like a gold mine! Probably by far one of the best bookmarking tools out there. Very clever how they implemented highlighting and sticky notes on the webpage. Search customization is also interestingly done… and everything is all nicely integrated. Well done, Diigo!”
— John

“The highlight feature works beautifully – great if you are an information hound like me. Have not seen a feature like this before – cool.”
— DHG

“your service seems to cater especially to my needs and my insatiable appetite for knowledge. While other services do offer some of the features you provide, one has yet to bundle all necessary web browsing tools into one package to revolutionize the experience.”
— Sapphire

Phil Crissman recently wrote a short comment about Diigo: http://philcrissman.com/?p=888

“I only just started using Diigo this morning, and it’s very interesting.

Diigo operates via a browser toolbar, and is available for Firefox, IE, and Flock. It offers many options for adding notes (public and private) to web-pages, storing and sharing bookmarks, subscriptions to RSS feeds, and more. I’m only just learning all the different things you can do with Diigo, so I’ll try to post a more informed review soon. In the meantime, my short acquaintance with it is enough for me to say that it has a lot of potential; keep an eye on this.”

Phil and I exchanged some chat. Indeed we all find the recent emergence of lots of new online services an interesting phenomenon. Phil puts it well: “These various new sorts of sites/tools/social-networking-whatevers are interesting, especially given all the new ones being made, and the creativity that is going into them to try and differentiate themselves from one another.”

This is certainly a healthy competition, and the resulting creativity should be very beneficial to all web users and society as a whole. Let one thousand flowers bloom! We’re glad to take part of this new wave of creativity process!

– Maggie

Jibone wrote in his recent blog post (http://blog.jiboneus.com/2006/01/23/diigo-social-annotation-services/):

“There are tons of social bookmarking sites out there and then there is Diigo. Unlike the other social bookmarking del.licio.us wannbie, I actually like Diigo.”

Thank you, Jibone, for differentiating Diigo from other social bookmarking sites.

Right now, the noise level in the social bookmarking space seems very high. We’ve never conceived and designed Diigo to be just another social bookmarking site. In fact, Diigo is about “Social Annotation”, a superset of social bookmarking.

By allowing users to add highlights, comments and interactions right on the page, in situ, personally, we think this makes Diigo not only a more useful personal tool, but also a more powerful social tool that enables more fruitful interactions and connections among “information consumers”. A lot more cool features will be forecoming…

-Maggie

Josh Gentry has been writing several articles on the subject of web annotation on his blog, and he recently wrote (http://www.joshgentry.com/egoburp/archives/category/web-annotation/):

“Diigo is an incremental evolution in human-information interaction. It combines web annotation, which I’ve written about several times, with the social construction of knowledge. It embraces tagging and social bookmarking, as many now are, and extends it to the next step, social annotation.

Diigo’s online service approach addresses several problems of web browsing. First, how do I preserve this information I’ve found on the web? You bookmark it. But what if the page moves or is removed? With Diigo, when you bookmark, a copy of the page is saved on Diigo’s servers.

Now that I’ve found and saved the page, how do I interact with it? Our model is how we interact with paper documents; We highlight and we make notes. Diigo enables you to both highlight and add notes.

That stuff is great, but it gets better. Diigo allows you to make your annotations public. A user of the service see’s the public annotations of other Diigo users. In the future, Diigo will allow the creation of groups.

With Google’s PageRank and with social tagging, we find information by the wisdom of the crowd, by word-of-mouth. With Diigo it is now easier than ever to share our collective thoughts on that information-our interpretations, extensions, criticisms and associations.

Bringing us full circle, Diigo allows you to tag your bookmarks, and see the tags of other Diigo users. More help finding the information, the comments, and then adding your own. It’s a positive feedback loop.”

Thank you, Josh. We look forward to reading your suggestions for improvement!

-Maggie

John Gibarian — creator of stormgrass blog just wrote a nice review on Diigo: http://stormgrass.com/archives/2006/01/02/diigo-the-annotating-heaven/

Here are some quotes from his post:

“It’s the new year, and I’ll introduce it by introducing another great bookmarking service I’ve been made aware of lately. The pretty thing is called Diigo, and despite it’s rather clunky naming, I’ve fallen in love with it already. See, it’s actually much more than mere bookmarking. It’s an annotation service, which, if done properly and by many people, could be the single most interesting service to have emerged during the last few months.Apart from these features, it’s packed with functionality, most importantly a whole toolbar. Among other things, it gives the option of letting you simultaneously bookmark and tag in Del.icio.us as well as on Diigo, something I think is vital to many people, considering that people just don’t want to give up Del.icio.us at this point in time. But the most intriguing thing is the annotating part. It’s really quite intuitively implemented, complete with the option to make private or public comments, or the highlighting of whatever parts of a bookmarked webpage.

It’s just a real social bookmarking powerhouse, and I’d love it if more and more people started using it, because it would really add to a surfing experience if you’d be able to quickly see what other people have written about a respective site, simply by clicking the Diigo toolbar.”

Thanks, John, for your nice words and for sharing your enthusiasm about Diigo with the world!

-Maggie

Brian Benzinger at Solution Watch just wrote a very detailed and informative review on Diigo http://www.solutionwatch.com/303/diigo-social-bookmarking-and-annotation/

He nicely captured all the salient features of Diigo; hence, his review got trackbacks from various sources. Thank you, Brian, for the time you spent testing everything out and writing a great review about us.

I’m quite impressed — it’s New Year and Brian is still working hard! With his thoroughness in his product review, I’m sure to go read his other reviews 🙂

– Maggie

Tim Lauer, the principal at Lewis Elementary School keeps a very informative blog on how technology can be used by teachers and students to gain a greater understanding of their world, and as a means to tell their stories…

He recently wrote a nice post on Diigo (http://tim.lauer.name/archives/003874.html) which he concludes with

“The more I play with Diigo, the more it looks like an interesting alternative/compliment to del.icio.us.”

We’re excited that the educational community has started to discover the usefulness of Diigo, as we believe Diigo can be used as a great research tool for both personal use and collaborative group efforts.

By allowing Highlight and Add Sticky Notes, just like you’d on paper…

• Now you can highlight & jot down your comments directly on a webpage, and scan through all your research findings quickly.
• Easily extract and compile all your highlights across multiple pages for a given subject.
• Keep your annotations private or share with others.
• Exchange viewpoints on any specific area of a webpage – great for collaboration or debating an issue.

Illumen (or Joe), a senior editor at The AMCP Tech Blog, was among one of our very first beta testers. Illumen has been awesome in providing us with many valuable feedback and suggestions, and he has been great at being one of our “gate keepers” in giving out invites to our invitation-only closed beta 🙂

He just wrote a review on Diigo (http://amcptwo.blogspot.com/2005/12/diigo.html). Some quote from his post:

“I was given an invite into Diigo’s BETA, and as soon as I logged into the website I was struck by how smooth and well put-together it was. After several days of intensive testing, I realized that Diigo was an excellent extension, quite ready to leave BETA stage. I also realized that it was review material.”

Illumen, thanks for your many feedback and review!

-Maggie

The first public review on Diigo by Steven Cohen at Library Stuff just came out http://www.librarystuff.net/2005/12/diigo.html. It’s pretty neat to see Diigo’s name start showing up in Google, Technorati, and other search engines.

Steven is part of the Web2.0 workgroup and among the very first users to preview Diigo. He did a very nice job describing the social bookmarking functions of Diigo, and hopes this coverage will start to bring us more exposure and users. Thank you, Steven!

Steven mentioned in his review that he would like to see more social features built into the application. Indeed, we have intended to make Diigo a great social platform.

Since Diigo’s innovative in situ highlighting / annotation features may not be totally apparent to new users at the first glance, we should work even harder to bring out those key features to users’ attention. Well, that’s part of the valuable feedback and lesson learned in our beta testing.

-Maggie