“Making social bookmarking truly social”Faced with the daunting task of researching and annotating huge documents on the web, A few years ago Dr. Wade Ren and Maggie Tsai out-surfed the capabilities of browser bookmark features and online bookmarking services. If you have a long web document with only a few widely spaced relevant paragraphs what do you do?
Download here.
You print it out, or copy to a document and print then get out the old highlighter pen. Then you fax it, or scan it and send it along, and soon you have a problem. A problem that, for Ren and Tsai, turned into the opportunity to create a new social bookmarking service.

Yahoo, MySpace, Blip.tv, Sclipo and Viddler

As we discussed in a previous post, and as Dr. Ren reiterated, Diigo is like del.icio.us on steroids. It takes bookmarking functionality and extends it with forum, blog and messaging features. If you take the time to annotate a page, leave sticky notes, multiple and lengthy comments, and highlight key text on the page, you can then view and forward all the relevant information w/o having to go to the page, or see other public comments and highlights and interact with other Diigo users.

With support for and compatibility with del.icio.us, ma.gnolia and Simpy; plugins or bookmarklets for every major browser; openid support; compatibility with Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Windows Live Spaces and Drupal; a Facebook App; groups, lists, email and widgets; Diigo is embracing the open everything web 2.0 spirit and making a super useful community oriented tool.

But it’s not just for fun! We use it for internal research with private bookmarks and private groups. We have a few clients participating in Diigo groups almost like a Basecamp style project management site. Combined with other free site/services like Flickr, Wordpress or other blogs, and file sharing sites like drop.io and Zoho.com this could give 37signals a run for their money.Thanks to Wade and Maggie for the visit. It’s great meeting leaders in web development who live right here in Reno!

After Earl turned off the camera we gave them each a Red Bull and asked them what’s next. Here’s what they said: A LOT OF COOL STUFF… You didn’t think I was gonna tell you?!!?! Look for just about everything you want from Diigo to come to life in future versions.

-Mike