Diigo: the Ultimate Bookmarks Solution

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

As long-time readers know, I’ve become a huge fan of Instapaper over the last year or so for all my bookmarking and reading. It’s a great, simple site that lets me save a page with a single click, and then access the articles offline on my iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s the application I use most often, is one of the 21 iPhone apps that make everything awesome, and a crucial part of how I manage information.

But it’s losing the battle for my usership to Diigo, a bookmarking service I’ve previously professed my love for. It’s a fantastic bookmarking service, a way to save all your favorite sites and pages, and it’s always been better than Delicious, or Magnolia, or most other bookmarking options online. But it wasn’t as good as Instapaper – until now.

Diigo’s in the process of a new release that  might just blow all other information-managers, including Instapaper, out of the water. In addition to all the stuff other bookmark services do (let you share bookmarks, access them from anywhere, back them up, etc.), Diigo offers a number of features that make it stand apart.

• Content Search – Not only can you search your bookmarks, but you can actually search the content of the site you’ve bookmarked. This is huge for research, finding content in a weirdly-named page, and all sorts of other things.
• Annotations – You can take notes, highlight, and comment on websites that you bookmark, and then either show the page you’ve saved with the annotations, without them, or as it originally appeared.

• Sharing – Most bookmark services offer the ability to share a bookmark over Twitter, or Facebook, but Diigo’s is so powerful and so smooth that it’s the best way to share cool sites I’ve ever found.
• Groups – If you’re doing a research project, or working on a team, you can create groups, and share your bookmarks together – it’s an easy way to build a common-knowledge database.
• In-line Preview – If you click the word “Preview” next to your bookmark, Diigo actually loads the page inline. With one click, you can figure out which page you’re actually looking for, and do most of your bookmark-referring without ever leaving the Diigo page.

But that was all already available from Diigo – and I eventually left, because of Instapaper’s simplicity, offline availability, and awesome iPhone application. Here’s why I’m switching back:

• Following – You can now follow someone on Diigo, much as you would on Twitter, and tap into a whole network of bookmarks. It’s potentially all the usefulness of Twitter, without the inane commentary.
• iPhone App – Waiting for approval is an iPhone app from Diigo that will, among other things, let you download bookmarks and read them offline. Assuming it gets approved, there goes my biggest reason for using Instapaper.

• Snapshots – Diigo lets you archive an entire web page, and make it searchable. Now there’s no worry about a site going down (which I’ve had happen at critical times), and there’s an easy way to take quick snapshots of how a site looked and felt, both in HTML and image format.
• Simpler interface – Diigo was always too complicated. Now, though, it’s easier to save, tag, and find bookmarks, both through the Diigo interface and the awesome Firefox extension, which gives you one-click sidebar access to all your bookmarks.

If you’re still looking for a simple way to just save a page for reading later, Diigo’s going to be too much – Instapaper may still be the tool for you. The reason I switched to Instapaper, though, was its simplicity, the one-step addition of bookmarks, and the ability to read them offline, anywhere. Diigo’s got all that covered now, plus its powerful tagging, incredible search, and the network and group ability that it does best.

Diigo won me back as the place I keep all my bookmarks. What’s yours?

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