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I don’t know where to start. I really don’t. When diigo’s press release said they were launching over 100 new features, I didn’t see how that could be possible. From the release:

This launch includes a completely new UI and code base, and over 100 new features. In addition to substantial improvements in its usability and power as a research tool, the new Diigo tightly integrates social networking with knowledge-sharing, making Diigo a pioneer in what may be called "social information networking."

I can’t say that I’ve counted the new features, but I have to say I’m blown away. "Blown away by a research tool/social annotation service?" I pretend you ask. Yes. It’s bad ass.

I covered diigo’s launch while at DEMOfall 2007 here, and encountered two problems: 1) technical glitches and 2) confusion. Social annotation is difficult. It’s almost completely experiential. When I say: "you now have the ability to highlight text on a page, bookmark it, and send to a predefined group," you’d likely say "WTF?". But if you were checking out an article online and wanted to share a snippet with friends, you’d probably copy text, fire up your email, etc. Lots of steps, lots of programs to launch, all for a task that should be ridiculously simple. If you realize the problem, diigo’s solution is a no-brainer.

One of my favorite things about diigo’s release today is this: When I’m playing around with any new service, I find myself asking "I wonder if I can do this…?" Usually I’m denied. In every case with diigo, I’m pleasantly surprised. For example, after saving a bunch of bookmarks, the blogger in me said "hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I could get a snippet of code from diigo to display my bookmarks on my blog?". Bam. Done. They have exactly that: Enhanced Linkrolls.

But enough of the foreplay. Let’s take a look at how diigo works:

Bookmarking

After creating an account, you install the diigo toolbar. It looks a lot like this:

When you’re on a page you want to bookmark, a popup comes up:

Through this popup, your bookmark is saved to diigo, can be sent as a post to twitter, sent to your friends, tagged, etc.

The dashboard:

Through the logged in dashboard, users can access all their bookmarks as well as their friends’ bookmarks.

Taking a look at a single bookmark:

You can see other people that have saved the same bookmark and made annotations:

Allowing you to find people with similar interests.

What’s New

1. People Like Me-

Matching diigo users based on the similarity of recent bookmarks.

2. Sidebar-
The diigo sidebar (accessible by clicking from the toolbar) lets you access all of your bookmarks wherever you are. No need to sign in at the diigo site to get your stuff. It’s right here in the browser.

3. Group Voting and Tagging- Though I do not use diigo as a collaborative annotation and research tool, this release of diigo has new team research capabilities such as the ability for a team to vote on an item (digg style) and a Tag Dictionary, allowing all team members to agree on common tags for items.

4. Social Browsing- While browsing the web, use the toolbar to see what people have said about the site you’re on. Through the same sidebar, you’re also able to see what other readers have bookmarked and/or commented on a page (by clicking the This URL link). In addition to showing which diigo users have bookmarked the page, you can see a list of users that have bookmarked any page on the site, and you can read their comments from the sidebar.

5. Content Discovery- Diigo is starting to focus more on becoming a source of content by improving their recommendation and discovery functionality. Users can discover content through their friends and by diigo’s matching feature, which looks for content similar to your own bookmarking activity.

6. Share Outside of diigo- Like the "Twitter This" box above, you can share your bookmarks with people outside of diigo. Currently the options are sending by email, adding to facebook, and sharing on twitter.

Summing It Up

Like I said way back in the beginning of this post, you’ve gotta try this thing out to understand it. It’s not a solution to a problem; it’s a group of many solutions to many problems. If you ever need to share stuff you’ve found online, or if you need to keep all your clippings in one place, this is for you. Even if you ignore the other 99 new features, you’re going to like diigo.

Filed under: DEMO, Uncategorized, media discovery, recommendation, social media