Diigo is del.icio.us meets Wikalong. That is bookmarking meets site comments. It is something that del.icio.us has the potential to do, but doesn’t do. And it is something that is (certainly if a critical user mass is reached) that would be extraordinarily useful. But what actually is it?

Let me explain by continuing this comparison with del.icio.us. Take this page it is the del.icio.us page for Google.com. It is full of comments about the site. Now everyone knows what Google is so the comments aren’t very useful. But maybe you are about to sign up for a service and want to check whether it is reputable, or maybe you’re buying a product and you want to check for other peoples reviews. So lets now take this page instead to see what people think of Diigo.com. So what is the difference between diigo and del.icio.us? They both have this comments thing for sites. Well two words are the difference.

Diigo is . You don’t have to fish around by going to del.icio.us to see what people think of a site, it is written on the page in front of you. People can even specify particular words that they are interested in, or want to comment about. Perhaps they could highlight the $100 shipping costs on a products page in the small print. Or the clear flaw in a politician’s argument. The potential is pretty obvious. It makes the web experience interactive. Everyone sees the same pages — why shouldn’t you talk about them. It truly is therefore annotation. Not just bookmarking but also highlighting and adding “stickies”. It is like Gabbly’s live chat for every page, but comments are permanent.

I am sure you will agree this is quite a complicated idea, and since the vast majority of surfers still use browser based bookmarks it seems to me that broadscale adoption is a long way off. And that is a shame. Diigo will only be “worth” using if more people are using it. Luckily at the moment they let you post to somewhere else at the same time so that you can keep your del.icio.us up to date whilst you try out the new tools.

So diigo is a smart idea, a clever one even if (thinking Wikalong again) it is not new. The implementation of the idea is what determines the flopp factor for this service. And quite frankly I am not impressed. It comes as an extension for Firefox and a plugin I imagine for IE, or for the worst case scenario it is a bookmarklet for any other browser. I am using the extension and it is awkward. By default diigo gives itself far too much. A right click reveals a diigo command at the top. A single click gives another diigo menu. It also gives you an extra toolbar (which I hastily removed). The right click menu is silly too. It should just say “Bookmark…” but no it is a diigo subsection that you have to move across into. Messy.

The screenshot to the right gives you a good comparison between the way diigo and del.icio.us integrate themselves. Note that the “Search Web” thing is also diigo’s doing and it opens sub menu after sub menu all for absolutely no reason. Search is easy enough. I click my search box and type. It is more of a bother to highlight something and then navigate through that maze of engines to find some decent results. Why they include this is beyond me. Do one thing, don’t make a mess at the same time. The windows that pop up for you to fill in notes, and tags about the bookmark/highlight/sticky you are making are browser based. It is not a pop up. This is nice I suppose. But it too is cluttered with stuff I am not interested in. The amount of options available in the options panel of this extension gives some indication of how over complex this tool has been made. Yes it is a good idea, but good implementation is needed. And right now, with a website UI that also leaves much to be desired, diigo just doesn’t have it.

If you would like to give this service a whirl yourself, then be in touch and I will invite you in.

I am playing around with Diigo right now. I am taking an extended review period so I get a real feeling of what it is like to use the service to keep track of things. My feelings so far are mixed. Some things in it are smooth others more bitty. And I find some of it all a little too complex for an activity that is supposed to be making things easy for me. Anyway we’ll see.

And we all move forth. With Flock.

It has just been released as a public beta. It has been kicking around as an alpha for a long while, but this is their first step towards making a disciplined and stable release. And I have downloaded and installed it and I am very impressed. Flickr has never been so accessible. And it adds (or in fact removes) a whole step of the del.icio.us posting model that I use to get things to the links log. This is definately something to check out, I am even blogging direct from Flock for this post.

On February 13th 2006 I moved over to ma.gnolia.com for online bookmarking, and I posted about the change and reviewed the new service. I had previously posted about and used del.icio.us which is pretty much the standard tool for online bookmarking. Ma.gnolia has generally behaved well (apart from the one hiccup) and I have enjoyed the bonus features that is offers in comparison to del.icio.us. I like the permanent links for each bookmark, I like the way it saves you pages as they were when you bookmarked them, I like the way it sometimes gives a screenshot, I like the private bookmark feature, and the groups are ok. I have however experienced a few bad points too. It is much slower than del.icio.us, mainly I suspect because of its much more done up interface. It also has recently become covered with image adverts which don’t help the loading time or the look of the page. The tag clouds are also quite frankly rubbish. There is just something wrong with the different sizes, the contrast is too poor.

I have found that the extra features tend to distract from the focus of the site, and make my bookmarking less productive. Del.icio.us has a no nonsense interface, and are there adverts? I never saw any. They have also just released private bookmarks and inline editing. So I am moving back to del.icio.us, with a slightly shorter domain this time. The import function is down for the time being so I will wait for that to go up, then I will change the sidebar and my bookmarking bookmarklet.

[ View Full Image ]

Possibly the most embarrasing thing to happen to a startup? Forgot to reregister their domain name by the looks of things! Don’t worry though, ma.gnolia is back online now.

Update: It is down again at 22.00 GMT. Message now says that “This domain is currently under construction”. I have just sent the following mesage to product manager Todd Sieling, who commented on my initial review of ma.gnolia:

It seems that ma.gnolia.com has fallen off the web for the second time today. Could you guys let the users know what is going on? And maybe set up an (external) blog for future such outages.

But the message came straight back with server not found. It appears that they are really, really, really down.

Update 2: Ma.gnolia.com is back up.

Update 3: Message from Todd:

We had a domain renewal snafu that has now been fixed. I’m not sure what happened that you saw us go off twice, but as far as I know everyone who should be able to get back on can.

So there you go!

Ma.gnolia is the new bookmarking service that promises to make bookmarking more social, more fun. Their tagline is “Found is the New Search”. Bold hey? Certainly sounds so. But it is just bookmarking right? Like the del.icio.us we all know and use. So what is Ma.gnolia’s big pull? Well apart from the cooler interface than del.icio.us, on the social side of things, Ma.gnolia seems much better equipped. It has groups of people sharing bookmarks. It has personal profiles. And it has everything syndicated onto your land page when you sign in. Neat.

First things first though. You’ve got 6582 bookmarks (yeah, you’re a heavy surfer) saved and tagged up in del.icio.us. That is a hell of a load of bookmarks. Far too many to even think about manually moving them across. Here Ma.gnolia works well. There is an import function. And it allows you to upload all of your bookmarks from a xml file that you can pull from del.icio.us (or various other services). Once they are uploaded Ma.gnolia gets them processed so you don’t lose any of your tags, comments or links. Great. It even offers you a little box to put in a tag that you would like to apply to all of your imported bookmarks. Like “imported” or “frombefore”. I am not really 100% sure why you would want to do this, but I did it anyway. As you might imagine it is now my far the biggest tag in my collection.

Now I have got my bookmarks in I see that there is a link to edit my profile. Here I can enter personal detais for public show, choose an avatar (or upload one) and update my email receiving settings. Now a navigate over to my bookmarks again. Using the tabs (actually text links, but they serve as tabs) along the top of the interface. This gives me the page with bookmarks from me, from my contacts, and from my groups. This is largely identical to what Flickr does with photos on your main page. I can focus onto just my bookmarks by clicking “View All”. To the right is still some syndicated content along with a box to search through my bookmarks with and another box to allow me to add to my bookmarks. In the list of bookmarks itself there are more differences from del.icio.us. There are icons under each of the titles for the bookmarks to allow you to quickly do a few things. You can make a bookmark private (or not), send it to someone, or send it to a group. There is also a set of stars to allow for an instant rating out of 5 to be given. This is neat and useful. Rather like the stars in Gmail, but this obviously allows for more detail in your dishing out of importance.

[ View this screenshot in large. ] (Continued)

Delicious is a site to store your bookmarks. Great. I thought that was a job for browsers. Well I suppose it is, but when you use more than one computer regularly keeping synched copies of all your favourite sites becomes a real pain. Especially if using a single-profile shared PC where making bookmarks cannot be done. Also when you make bookmarks only you can see them. You don’t get to share your wonderful finds with the other millions of web surfers. That is why we have delicious.

It has obviously got a really cool web address (del.icio.us) and it is a really cool site. You post your bookmarks, and then you can access them anywhere. The other perk is that you can see what other people are bookmarking, and you can share your bookmarks with others. The sites also allows for the tagging of your bookmarks (translates to: labels in Gmail, tags in flickr) and the bundling of tags into larger catergories. All of this means your bookmarks can be organised and accessible. Get a better idea of what del.icio.us is about on the site.

The great thing is using your Firefox browser you can add a bookmark with this address as the link location and say “deli” as the keyword or even “d”. Then when you find a site you like you just need to go to the address bar (CTRL + L) and type “deli” or “d” and press return. The site you were viewing will be bookmarked, and you will get the chance to add tags, notes etc. You can alternatively make it a button in your browser but I personally value the screen space too highly. At the moment I am using del.icio.us to keep track of sites that I may want to later blog about on here. I anticipate that in the future del.icio.us will act as a full archive of those sites that I have discussed and some that I never got round to chatting about.