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Diigo is an online annotation service that allows you to “annotate (sticky notes), bookmark, highlight, save, and clip the content on the web that matters to them. All information is available from any browser, from any PC, and is also shareable with personal and business contacts.”

I’ve used many of the annotation services out there (Mister Wong comes to mind), and I tend to check them out, then revert to my usual bookmarking + rss subscribing + emailing things I like to friends. So I approached this service with well-earned skepticism.

The Features:

1. Annotation– After installing the Diigo search bar for Firefox, I immediately made my way to one of my favorite sites:

When I do this, I get a “bookmark saved message”, and it appears that I’m the only person that has bookmarked mashable. Weird. So I then decide to choose the “About this page” option:

Which instead of telling me about mashable, gives me:

Whaaaa?

I had my espn fantasy football team’s FantasyCast open in a different window, and instead of showing me information on mashable, I got information on ESPN fantasy cast. Weird, since the address box says http://mashable.com [Note: the information is about mashable…..the page title is the only thing incorrect]

Strange.

But looking past that glitch, let’s take a look at what information diigo gives about a page:

1. Google Links– The number of google links does not appear to work, as no matter which site I visit, I see zero google links. But when you click through, you can see how many google links are really there.

2. Delicious Links– How many people have bookmarked the page using del.ic.io.us

3. Yahoo MyWeb links

4. Technorati links

5. Digg Score

6. Rank– The page’s Alexa and PageRank

7. Readers– Who has read the page based on diigo’s users

8. URL Tag Cloud– What tags users use to categorize the page.

9. Bookmark History– When users have bookmarked the page, and which tags they’ve used

10. Public comment– These are the comments posted in sticky notes by diigo users. This is what I was expecting to see when I bookmarked mashable at first. So I assume that because I was unable to make my sticky note public, that’s why I was unable to see the other public comments.

2. Highlighting– Diigo gives you the following highlighting options:

1. Highlight

2. Highlight and Bookmark

3. Highlight and Sticky Note

4. Hightlight and Forward

5. Blog This

6. About This Page

The Good:

The “About This Page” info– if it works correctly (it’s a beta, I totally understand when things don’t work quite as expected…..especially when aggregating information from multiple APIs) the About This Page is a useful, central repository of data on a selected page. This feature could be incredibly useful to companies that want to see what people are saying about them, blogs that want to know what their readers think of their stories, and anyone curious about how their information is being perceived by readers.

Like the other social annotation services, the “Blog this” option is excellent, as it immediately does a cut and paste + login + compose + automatic reference citation.

The interface is also very straight-forward and easy to use. When you log in at diigo, there are no points of confusion, and you can easily access your bookmarks and annotated content wherever you are. I could have really used something like this in college.

The Bad:

A few technical glitches, but that’s expected at this early stage in the game. The only other problem I see with diigo is that they are in an incredibly crowded space, but I like their angle.

Conclusion:

Like most of these services, it would be unfair to spend an afternoon trying to scratch the surface and give a detailed review of the features. Now that I’ve got the Firefox plugin installed, I’ll continue giving diigo a shot. To me, it would be interesting to see a side-by-side feature comparison between the different social bookmarking and annotation services out there. But that’s for another day, as this is Sunday, the Patriots are playing now, and the Sox have game seven tonight. Priorities, my friends, priorities.

Filed under: DEMO, social media