This is a hard one for me… But I’ve stopped using Delicious as of yesterday. Delicious was, probably, the first Web 2.0 application that I started using it. I remember “back in the day” trying to explain its usefulness to TJ. I had high hopes for the service when Yahoo bought them three years ago. But honestly, even with their latest release – they have stopped innovating.
I checked out Diigo on the recommendation of Mike Fruchter sometime ago via FriendFeed. Since signing up I hadn’t really used it. But, the latest update to delicious broke my Daily Digest series – which was the final straw. And since Diigo allows you to import from Delicious, there really is no switching costs for me. That being said I have been extremely happy with my Diigo experience.
Here are six reasons Diigo is better than Delicious
1. It’s more social
Diigo has an extra level of social networking that Delicious does not provide – at least not in a usable manner. You can connect with people that have similar interests based on what you tag.
2. Annotations
The annotations feature is very cool. When you bookmark something, you can highlight notable sections to refer to later. And any other Diigo users can see your highlights when they visit the page if they have the toolbar installed.
3. Superior UI and Experience
Aside from all the snazzy features, the core “bookmarks” interface is much better than that of delicious – offering many additional features and better organization.
4. Microblogging
The microblogging feature in delicious never got a chance. This is the “daily post” feature that basically posts a digest to your blog of all the bookmarks you have saved over X amount of time. Delicious always had it as an “experimental feature”, for 3 years. Diigo does it so much better, allowing you to post only specific tags to your blog as well as providing more customization features.
5. Discovery
Now, this is something that delicious did fairly well but is pretty much a product of its large community. But Diigo does a great job at it too, allowing you discover what’s hot across the network but also within a group of friends. It also has a “watchlist” feature that allows you to keep tabs on certain tags in the network. And last, it shows you a river of bookmarks from your network – with a neat tag cloud to see what your community is tagging the most.
6. Better Toolbox
You can import, export. There are widgets, linkrolls, and tagrolls. They offer several ways to interact with the service – through context menu, toolbars, bookmarklets. There’s a Facebook app. You can “save elsewhere” too. So, if you still want to post stuff to delicious (let’s say you have a great community there), you can set that up. What this does is posts your new bookmarks to the other services whenever you post them to Diigo.
All in all Diigo wins hands down.
So ditch delicious, sign up, and join me.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Andy,
Glad that you’ve discovered diigo. Thanks for taking your time to write a great review – succinct and to the points, and sharing it with your readers!
We are developing Diigo to scratch our personal itch – how to discover, process, manage, and share online information more productively and effectively. Since diigo is designed with productivity in mind it’s all the subtle details, the depth of features, and how everything is nicely integrated that make the user experience count.
Like to welcome you and your friends to the Diigo community!
Best,
Maggie
co-founder
Diigo
Save to delicious doesn’t work for me – I use the Diigo toolbar, and my delicious account is verified by Diigo, but it doesn’t update! Any ideas?
I’m not sure Bob! It works great for me… Have you asked diigo? They’ll answer on twitter (@diigo) and have great support!
I left Blinklist one month ago and start using Diigo.
But there are some details in the social bookmark tool that make it worst than the others, just like these:
- Diigo doesn’t permit you give stars to the sites you most like, so they can appear in first place in a given list. Blinklist does it very well. Starring your sites is a good and esay way to have access to your “favorites of favorites”.
- Diigo doesn’t have a Quick Start Page, like Blinklist does. This page is something like iGoogle and Netvibes, where you can put all the sites you visit often.
- Diigo doesn’t permit you organize your bookmarks in bundles, like Delicious does. The bundles are excellent to find the tags associated with any given issue.
That is it. I hope Diigo become, in the future, a complete bookmarking tool, offering us all the facilities the others already have.
I’ll take you seriously after you delete your delicious account. hehe
I found the diigo firefox plugin heavy handed and intrusive – in the end i disabled it and lost interest in the site. sorry.
@Richard That\’s weird I think the Firefox plugin is as easy to use as the delicious one as well as being more powerful. To each their own!
Without bundles / any form of hierarchy, tags can easily lose their value and instead make life more difficult while you try to remember that esoteric tag name you chose to isolate a subject. This is highlighted in your own bookmark list where over 50% of your tags has 2 or less bookmarks. I don’t want to scan for the correct tagname either alphabetically or by order of magnitude, I find it much easier to drill down until I reach the bookmark I need.
Is there an actively developed, innovative bookmarking system with proper support for reasonably simple hierarchies?
@Alasdair I use multiple tags for different purposes. I may tag an article with its topic and an action. So if it’s an internet marketing article I want to blog about, I tag it “internet marketing” and “getanewbrowser”. That’s why you will see many of my bookmarks tagged “getanewbrowser”.
Some of my tags have internal meanings and some are for social shareability. If you have a question about structures using Diigo, you should definitely get in contact with Maggie, the co-founder of Diigo. She and the Diigo team can best be reached at http://twitter.com/diigo. I’ll see if she can stop here and clarify any questions you have.
@Davi – Like I told Alasdair, Diigo does an AMAZING job at communicating with their users. You should let them know your ideas at http://twitter.com/diigo
Well, I definitely think a microblogging feature would be helpful. Is this something that is in beta version, or is it here to stay?
Yea it's here to stay! <p style=”color: #A0A0A8;”>