Diigo may replace del.icio.us for me

I've been a huge fan of del.icio.us and I've tried and rejected many of the potential replacements for the service. Recently I read about Diigo and I figured I'd give it a try. Turns out I love it very much. :-)

I use del.icio.us in three primary ways. Straight up personal bookmarks, as a service to power the sidebar links on the blog, and as a kind of personal search engine (I conduct searches there to see what other people have found on a given topic, and I have various types of del.icio.us powered RSS feeds in my feed reader). What I don't get from del.icio.us, and didn't miss until now, is the ability to annotate my bookmarks, either privately or publicly. Diigo allows me to save a bookmark and even highlight and comment on multiple parts of the page for future use. I can make my annotations public or private and I can read others' public annotations.

I know other services have done this in the past, but to my knowledge it's always been a kind of walled garden. I can use the service, but only really benefit when other people use it too. Plus there weren't cool extra features like RSS and getting your bookmarks pushed out to the sidebar of your blog. Not easily at least. Anyway, the cool thing about Diigo right now is that it allows me to continue to publish to del.icio.us. I just use the Diigo toolbar to bookmark my stuff and it automatically copies it, tags and all, over to my del.icio.us account.

Diigo does other cool stuff too, like give you options to search a variety of engines on a given word or phrase you've highlighted on a page. I'm not a big fan of toolbars--I prefer bookmarklets--but Diigo's is pretty useful. Lots of options that make sense and it's easy to turn options on or off. They even have a bookmarklet if you really don't like the toolbar approach.

Overall it's a pretty cool app and great for keeping track of web research. If you do much research on the web and find yourself juggling all your notes, this could be a big help.