PDF Annotation, Social Members for Anti-spam, and the New Pricing Plan lead to Diigo 6.0!

Dear Diigo Users,

We are excited to release the capability to annotate PDF files, a feature that has been among the most requested for a long time. The reason that it has taken us so long to release this feature is that PDF is a proprietary standard and very challenging to work with, especially within browsers. But with enough dedication to the problem by our team, we are happy to finally take it out of beta.

Another problem that we have been struggling for a long time is spam – spammers have been very aggressive and crafty on our site, harassing users and importing junky content. Spammers are costing us lots of resources not only in hardware, but also in manpower as we spent time developing anti-spam techniques and manually policing the site.  We have decided to take a different approach to this problem by limiting the social privileges of free users.  We now require captcha on many social features, such as following people, joining groups, etc. For a very nominal fee, you can upgrade yourself to “Social Membership,”  which would grant you full social features without capcha, plus a lot of other goodies.  We expect to stop the vast majority of the spammers with this simple measure.

We’d like to elaborate more about Social Membership and its pricing and our thoughts behind the decisions.   As long-time Diigo users know, Diigo is a personal knowledge management tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community on the other hand.  While it is perfectly fine to use Diigo solely as the former, we do believe that the value of the knowledge-sharing community could be substantial, as the number of active users increases, and as the spam is minimized.  As a result, we have decided to set the social membership annual fee at $5/year on Oct 1, 2014,  and will increase the price gradually thereafter according to a pre-determined formula, as the number of active social members increases.  To reward existing users, an attractive promotion price of $2/year will be available until Oct. 1, 2014.  For future years, you will continue to pay the low annual price you paid in the first year, as long as your credit card stay valid for automatic renewal.

We have also taken this opportunity to re-adjust our pricing plan to better align users needs with our business model.   Existing basic and premium users will be automatically upgraded to Standard in the new pricing plan.

We believe that it is paramount for both the Diigo team and Diigo users that Diigo has a viable financial model so it can continue to have the resources necessary to get better and better, and be around for 100 years or so 🙂    In the last few months, several products that sort of compete with Diigo, such as Springpad, Kippt, etc,  have either announced shut-down or were put on hold.  Diigo is in a better shape than these companies, thanks to your support, and we hope you will continue to show your support and help Diigo improve and flourish!

With these exciting developments, we feel ready to declare the arrival of Diigo 6.0. Although version number does not mean a whole lot with internet products like Diigo that are being continuously improved, we are still happy to use it as a reminder of the long journey we have been through and the exciting improvements to come.

Our team always sees our users as a partner in getting the product right, and we appreciate and look forward to your feedback and continued involvement.

 

New Feature – Save Links and Notes Through Email

This feature allows you to email your links and notes directly into your Diigo library. This is especially handy when you are on a mobile app. Emailed links or notes will be saved as private by default.

Go ahead and get started now.

If you are unsure how this feature works, check out the following illustrations by screenshots.

1) Send a link to your personal diigo email address from a mobile App:

Save by email

2) The emailed link is saved in your library:

Emailed

Diigo Welcomes its 7th Million User with a Major Redesign

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Diigo Welcomes its 7th Million User with a Major Redesign
~ heightening its focus on being a “multi-tool” for knowledge management

Diigo was started as a simple social bookmarking service in 2005, and is now widely regarded as the most widely used and most robust web annotation tool in the world. By steadily enhancing its offerings beyond bookmarking/annotation to include web archiving, image/screenshot markup, group collaboration, improved information organization and presentation, and mobile apps, Diigo has effectively become an integrated “multi-tool” for personal knowledge management (PKM).

Diigo, as a multi-tool for PKM, now touches on the entire workflow for knowledge-oriented information consumption, from browsing, reading, researching, annotating, storing, organizing, remembering, collaborating, sharing, to connecting dots into knowledge – a workflow that we believe is still largely ad-hoc and inefficient.  Diigo is here to streamline this workflow and dramatically improve your productivity.

The current redesign includes the following:

  • a complete site redesign which includes numerous usability and aesthetic improvements

  • a redesign of the company logo and brand image to emphasize our focus on personal knowledge management.

  • a complete redesign of Diigo Web Collector, our flagship browser extension on Chrome browser.

  • a major update to Diigo Browser on iOS, which provides the best web reading and annotating experience on iPad and iPhone (coming soon)

As Diigo has steadily became more versatile and powerful, it has also steadily grown its user base, amassing 7 million registered users,  with more than 350 million items saved and 100 million pieces of annotations.  Our users include law firms, marketing agencies, consultants, recruiters, web designers, researchers, students, teachers … — basically anyone who do a lot of knowledge-oriented information consumption, either individually or as a team, either professionally, or for personal purposes such as reading and researching related to travel, health, shopping, career, hobbies, news, online learning, smart investing, school papers, work projects, etc, etc.

Going forward, the Diigo team aims to evolve Diigo into the best personal knowledge management system (PKM) on the market, providing unsurpassed capabilities for the collection, compilation, organization, digestion, presentation and collaboration of knowledge and information.

Import Google Reader Starred Items

If you use Google Reader, you must have heard that it will close down soon. As avid Google Reader users ourselves, we feel your pain and have prepared a small pain reliever for you: you can easily import your starred items in Google Reader to Diigo.

The closing of Google Reader again reminds us that it is important to make sure the services you rely on have a sustainable business model. At Diigo, it is your paid subscription that sustain our developers to keep Diigo fast and reliable, and make it better and better. If you have not upgraded, show your support for less than $2 per month and get a lot of goodies now!

Diigo Chrome Extension much enhanced, renamed as “Diigo Web Collector”

Over the past month or so, we have rolled out some significant enhancements to the Diigo extension on Chrome browser. With the new extension, you can now:

  • Capture and markup screenshots
  • More easily add highlights, especially multi-color highlights
  • Access cached versions of web pages you bookmarked
  • Easily add pages to read later (and optionally close the page automatically)
  • Save images from webpages as part of a bookmark or as a separate item
  • Support keyboard shortcuts
  • Search your library from the extension (coming soon) 

For more details, please see the changelog here >>

The new extension is now named “Diigo Web Collector” to reflect the fact it enables a variety of ways for you to collect web content of interest to you, so you can:

  • Just bookmark the link
  • Save the page itself
  • Capture screenshot
  • Add highlights and sticky notes
  • Save images on the page

Diigo’s mission is to provide you with the best experience for collecting and annotating your online content.  Let us know how we are doing and how we can do better!

Webpage Caching Improved

As Diigo users know, Diigo has always strived to provide the best capability on the market for your bookmarking and annotation needs.  One of the things that differentiate Diigo from other bookmarking services is that Diigo not only lets you save a link,  Diigo enables you to save the page itself! This provides several significant benefits:

  • Have a peace of mind that whatever you were interested in will always be there.
  • You can have more powerful search capability since our internal search engine can index the page text itself, in addition to meta data like titles, tags, and annotations.
  • You can cache multiple versions of the same page at different times to track the changes for purposes of competitive intelligence or whatever.

We are now releasing several improvements to the caching feature:

  1. The ability to view and add annotations on cached pages, so the same annotations will show up on both the cached pages and the original page.
  2. The ability to easily visit cached pages from your Diigo Chrome extension (other extensions and Diigolet to follow.) So when you browse to a webpage you bookmarked before, you will see a link to “Cached Versions” on the extension.  This can be a lifesaver if the page is not available for whatever reason.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Introducing "Readict" by Diigo ~ iPad RSS Reader with Annotation capability!

The success of the Apple iPad since its launch has been nothing short of phenomenal. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the ipad, the widely and wildly anticipated tablet-style computer that he called “a truely magical and revolutionary product”:

“What this device does is extraordinary,” Jobs said. “It is the best browsing experience you’ve ever had. … It’s unbelievably great … way better than a laptop. Way better than a smartphone.”

For those iPad users who take reading seriously, you should check out “Readict (Pro)” ~ a new iPad RSS reader. It is an iPad reading app that integrates highlighter and “read later” functionalities to provide efficient and effective reading experience.

readictlogo

Here are some key features:

Customize RSS Feeds ~ from popular sources, Google Reader, Twitter favorites, etc

readict-feeds

Annotate Article ~ add highlighter and sticky note for more effective reading

readict-highlight

Download to Read Later ~ download links for fast reading later, without interrupting your flow

readict-download

app-store-badgeYou can download Readict (Pro) from the Apple AppStore.

Diigo ports three of its most popular Chrome apps to Firefox 4

 

As Mozilla is gearing up to public release of Firefox 4, Diigo is proud to announce the release of three new Firefox 4 extensions, all ported from Diigo’s popular Chrome Apps. Joel Liu, product manager at Diigo Inc, commented: “Firefox 4 provides a significantly improved development platform, and much better user experience. We are thrilled to bring our popular apps onto this platform, getting ready for its public launch soon.“

Diigo’s new Firefox add-ons include:

Quick Note, available in Firefox, Chrome, Mac
Awesome Screenshot, available in Firefox, Chrome, Safari
Read Later Fast, available in Firefox, Chrome

All these three apps/extensions are designed to focus on a single-function to deliver the best-of-breed functionality, as well as fool-proof usability. Though still in beta, and not yet fully integrated with Diigo.com, they have already received rave reviews from both the press and users.

The Chrome versions of these apps were released three months ago and have already become some of the most popular and highest rated apps in Chrome Web Store, specifically,

Please go check out these brand new Firefox add-ons today:

 

 

 

If you like them, please show your support by giving them a big five-star rating , and tell your friends! Remember, you do not need to be Diigo users to enjoy these single-function apps!

Check out what some users say about “Quick Note”:

  • This is the best app. I’ve been looking for a note app like it for quite some time. Nothing quite cut the cake – except this.
  • Really useful! Especially when I’m doing research for a project.
  • I love this app so much. I move notes from Windows to Linux to Android and to my CR-48. So simple and it just works.
  • Awesome app, extremely useful, it the hub of all my notes, quickly accessible and saved to cloud
  • Great simple quick note tool that can sync across mobile devices and web! highly recommended for organizing your life!
  • Great way to take quick notes without having to open a word processor or some other program. My browser is always open and with 2 clicks I have a new tab and a note pad to type on! Wonderful for taking notes in meetings, capturing those spur of the moment ideas, etc.
  • It’s great. I’m saving trees by using a whole of a lot less post-its.
  • Awesome truly HTML 5 app. You guys are the benchmark for web apps. Great work folks!

User comments on Awesome Screenshot:

  • The best. Forget Snag-It
  • Excellent. Capture and annotation in one fluid workflow. Huge timesaver.
  • This is the best whole page screen capture extension, super mega bonus for annotation tools.
  • I create a lot of web-based tutorials in my company. This is a great tool for doing that. Thanks for developing.
  • Awesome. Just what I was looking for. Not too complicated, not to simple. Excellent options.
  • This is incredible! Saves me so many steps…..and saves tons of time!
  • I am computer illiterate, totally, just installed this add on, its “awesome”. its easy to use

User comments on Read Later Fast:

  • PC World: ““Falling under the “devastatingly useful but simple” category, Read Later Fast does exactly what its name suggests.”
  • This is one of the best apps on Chrome. But not only can you save ANY page to read later, you can also view them offline! This is great when you need to view things and your internet is down. I have a Wikipedia page that I kept a few weeks ago and I can still view the whole article with all of the pictures!
  • Great app and extremely useful. Helped me cut down on the 30 plus tabs I usually have open.
  • One of the most useful apps for me. I used to keep tens of references to interesting web pages in tabs for months, so my tabs were cluttered. Not anymore.
  • These diigo apps are amazing. Finally I can start reading on my work mac, pick it up at home on my pc and finish on my iPad.

Quick Note by Diigo ~ the quickest way to take notes in Chrome

Quick Note by Diigo is a light-weight note-taker with a slick interface.   Released to the Chrome Web Store a few weeks ago, it has quickly become one of   the Top 20 Most Popular Chrome Apps.

Diigoquicknote Chrome Web Store

Today,  we are bringing the goodies back to the Diigo users, by enabling seamless syncing of Quick Note with Diigo.com.

Quick Note (QN) is a web app that feels  like a full-blown desktop app and can be used offline. You can use it to jot down simple notes,  as well as to clip from webpages as you browse.

Quick Note is featured by Chrome Web Store and was mentioned by several tech watchers as one of  their Best Top Chrome App Picks. See how users raved about “Quick Note”:

  • Awesome truly HTML 5 app. You guys are the benchmark for web apps. Great work folks!
  • It is one of the most beautiful apps I have seen here and it simply does what it promises to do.
  • Excellent, because it is exactly what I needed. And I *really* appreciate it being in the context menu ; copy and paste to Quick Note, et voila. Plus, nice design, what more to ask for ?
  • Great simple quick note tool that can sync across mobile devices and web! highly recommended for organizing your life!
  • This is the best app. I’ve been looking for a note app like it for quite some time. Nothing quite cut the cake – except this.
  • It’s the perfect application to keep a track of my notes 🙂 Just love it!!!
  • ———

    Hot Update: Quick Note has just been released in the Mac App Store (syncing with Diigo coming soon)