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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