Diigo Launches, Nobody Cares

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Diigo, the "social annotation" tool (ie. another social bookmarking site), has taken off the beta label and launched publicly today. The service, which first began its private beta back in December 2005, is an acronym for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff". The question is: does anybody care?

Diigo aims to create a better social bookmarking tool. You can choose between the Diigo toolbar, which works with IE, Firefox or Flock, and a conventional bookmarklet called the "Diigolet" (no Flock version yet). You can use these tools to highlight specific content on a webpage, bookmark it, or send the selected text to your blog. Rival Clipmarks offers some similar annotation features. The Diigo team seem very conscious of the fact that they're offering a "better del.icio.us" - as a result, they've added instant importing from del.icio.us and the ability to post to multiple social bookmarking sites from the toolbar itself.

Diigo isn't a terrible product, but I think it's safe to say it's going nowhere. Aside from the few hundred users who find the additional features useful, it's unlikely to see any real adoption. And I hardly need to mention that this is a crowded space - Ma.gnolia, eSnips, Jots, Fungow, SpinSpy, Simpy, RawSugar are just a few of the players here. Even serving up MySpace codes is unlikely to distance you from the competition. Once again, I think it's a case of too little, too late.

See also Folkd, which offers an alternative to Digg.

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