17 Reasons Delicious.com Users Should Head to Diigo

Perhaps it was to be a renegade, or maybe it was just because I always liked Diigo better.

I figured eventually Diigo would simply shut its doors, having lost out to Delicious.com. But with the news Yahoo intends to shut down the famed bookmarking service Delicious.com, I decided to share why exactly I’ve always liked Diigo better, and you should consider it as a great replacement for Del.icio.us.

1. It’s just as good as Delicious. If your goal is to create an online, shareable library of bookmarks. I’ve never become an expert in social bookmarking sites (I figured there’s enough other niches online that pay better) so I’m sure there are reasons people preferred Delicious over Diigo beyond it always being much bigger than Diigo, but I personally never found any good ones.

2. It’s very easy to share content, regardless of what browser you’re using.

3. It’s simple to import bookmarks from Delicious or any other bookmarking site.

4. It’s easy to tweet out or share via e-mail or Facebook something you just bookmarked with built in Diigo tools.

5. It’s a great for online research. Whether you live online as a marketer, blogger, or simply want to bookmark popular sites, Diigo not only allows you to bookmark the page, but you can highlight specific pieces of text, and add notes to the text. This was a big advantage I always felt over using Delicious. The bookmarks themselves and the annotations you make can remain public or private. I will say however, that I’ve never found public notes from others to ever be helpful. Much of it is sophomoric chit chat. Thankfully, you can adjust your settings so you don’t see the notes from others.

6. Annotations and highlights eliminate the issue of bookmarking a page, and later returning to it without remembering why you opted to bookmark it in the first place, or having to dig around to find the quote or piece of data you wanted to return to.

7. You can create special list of bookmarks, and share it with only specific groups on the site. I use this feature a lot for websites I want to share with my staff, but don’t want the whole world to know I’m bookmarking. For example, I have a list dedicated to client competitor websites, and another to online tools I use constantly.

8. You can get a RSS feed of your bookmarks, in case you want to quickly look at the last dozen or so bookmarks you’ve added.

9. The directories can both open up as a full web page, or just a sidebar extension. The sidebar also allows you to search and browse not just your bookmarks, but those of your friends’, and probably a whole lot more.

10. The search function and tags system works really well.

11. You can bookmark individual tweets, which to me remains downright amazing.

12. If Delicious.com users move en masse over to Diigo, the benefits of being able to search everyone else’s bookmarks will stay intact as well. That’s one of the best aspects of Delicious.com, that you can on one site essentially see what everyone else is finding useful.

13. And naturally, on Diigo there’s also a front page where you can see all the newest bookmarks posted, along with most popular tags.

14. They have versions for Android, iPhone and iPad

15. There’s a great bookmark toolbar that handles all the tasks I’ve mentioned above, and some version of it works with all browsers, including Rock Melt and Google Chrome.

16. Perhaps one of the best reasons to use Diigo is that the tool searches the full text of entire web pages you’ve bookmarked as well. If you have 75 documents stored on a single topic, and you want to find a single quote within those documents, you can search all of them simultaneously.This is something not available on every other social bookmarking service. ”…and because Diigo stores the highlights, annotations, and text on its own servers, it delivers,” wrote social media expert and author Tamar Weinberg, in her excellent book titled “The New Community Rules: Marketing On The Social Web.”(Not an affiliate link)

17. And maybe this is the best aspect of Diigo: There’s a professional version (which I haven’t used), which means they’re less likely to go under because they’re hopefully making enough money to remain afloat.

I’m sure others will chime in with better reasons and perhaps better online bookmarking systems. But if you’re like most people who frequently use the web, you want a good, stable, free way to keep your bookmarks online, keep some of them private, others public, and potentially share a selection within a core group of coworkers. Diigo does that and a whole lot more.

It’s the L.L. Bean of the social bookmarking world. Not too fancy, but embodies a certain kind of quiet coolness.

While Diigo has a lot of social sharing functions, I’d argue it caters more to people who like to bookmark things, than socialize on a bookmarking site. If that’s your goal, Stumble Upon is probably a better fit.

Want to learn more? Here’s a screen capture video that walks you through all Diigo has to offer.