DiigNO: Don't use Diigo

DiigNO: Don’t use Diigo or The problem with freemium.

By Aram Zucker-Scharff Monday September 19, 2011

If you really want to pull away from Delicious, use pinboard.in.

Image representing Diigo as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

There are a lot of tools on the internet, some are great, some not so much. Diigo is a tools you should stay away from. It seems like whatever you create on the service may disappear.

A while back, everyone thought that Yahoo was going to shut down Delicious and went out to find alternative web-bookmarking services. There were a number that stood out from the pack and received a lot of new users. Diigo, another social bookmarking service, came out as one of the leading competitors.

It turned out that Delicious was staying around after all and a lot of people went back. However, Diigo definitely increased their user base and is still going strong. I used the site for a little while, way back before the Yahoo drama, right after they gobbled up my favorite bookmarking services Furl. I’ve occasionally tried to use it in between now and then as well.

I more than don’t like it, I want to recommend you to stay away.

There are a lot of clever ideas in Diigo, the web-highlighting and sharing bar has most of them. However, I don’t like it when a site inserts a bunch of code into my rendered page. It’s one of the main reasons I don’t use StumbleUpon more. The lists and sticky notes are also good ideas and I want to acknowledge that as well. Annotation is clearly a big focus for Diigo as a service and that’s all in there.

The site itself is not very well designed. The left sidebar doesn’t make sense for most use cases. The whole thing just doesn’t look very good.

These are mostly side complaints however. My biggest problem is with how Diigo has implemented its Premium model in the past and how they might in the future.

Back when Furl disappeared and I had to move to Diigo I was using it for two things: collecting links in packages for research for blog posts to share with readers and archiving my work, so I could show it to potential employers, even if it disappeared off the web. Furl and Diigo both stood out then because they allowed you to archive the page you were looking at when you bookmarked it. This was great for saving clips or keeping track of constantly changing political campaign or party websites (which was part of what I was covering at the time).

Diigo took over Furl, transferred my bookmarks erased my cached pages. It was irritating, but not totally unexpected. I went through all the pages I needed to keep archived and re-cached them using Diigo’s system. I continued to save and cache stuff to Diigo for a while after that.

Then Diigo went Freemium.

When I received the notice, I didn’t think much of it. I noticed that they were now going to make people pay to use the page caching feature and didn’t connect it with my pre-existing cached pages. I simply assumed that my cached pages would continue to exist somewhere I could reach them.

Only later did I discover that the pages I had meticulously cached were no longer archived. This was especially depressing because the organization I had worked for had disappeared the posts off the internet, the very problem I had thought myself hedged against.

They had deleted their users’ content off the site without warning to increase the attractiveness of their premium product. This has to be the worst thing a service like Diigo can do. The action worried me so much that I stopped using the site all together.

It wasn’t because I was angry at Diigo for erasing my important content, though I definitely was that. The real concern is: if content disappeared without warning due to the premium version of the service, couldn’t anything you create using Diigo be held hostage to a premium fee?

All those extra features, highlighting, sticky notes, lists, etc… are interesting ideas and might be useful but are not exportable. If Diigo decides to make them premium functions the content you’ve put time into making on that service will be lost.

That’s why I’m recommending you should avoid Diigo.