Goodbye Diigo, hello Delicious (at least for now…)

I’ve been using the social bookmarking site Diigo for a little less than a year now, ever since it acquired Furl, a service I’d used for a couple years. Though Diigo has many “social” features, I used it primarily to gather transient links and feed information to Twitter via RSS.

Recently, though, some “upgrades” to the Diigo Firefox toolbar have made my use of the service a little less than easy. The “Add to List” feature, which I use to categorize links for different RSS feeds, stopped working, and try as I might (I’m not intimidated by fiddling with the Firefox about:config settings or otherwise monkeying with obtuseness) I couldn’t get it back.

The best workaround I found was to use the bookmarklet instead of the plugin, which opens an Ajax toolbar on the page you’re bookmarking. It worked well on most sites, but broke on Flickr, one of my primary sources for the We Like It Here feed.

On top of that, the Diigo “sticky notes” that are visible when the plugin is enabled were annoying me to no end. “Sticky notes” allow Diigo users to place a comment about a web site, and are displayed behind a little yellow icon. Not surprisingly, most of these “notes” add little if any value to the page; though perhaps not as inane as the chatter on YouTube, most are of a “Kilroy was here” variety. And unlike Google’s similar Sidewiki project, which demurely hides itself behind a sidebar button, Diigo notes are stuck to the page itself, a form of Web 2.0 vandalism. And though they could be turned off or selectively toned down through the plugin settings, I’m bothered by them on principle.

I poked around a bit on some of the other “social bookmarking” services, looking for something that would meet my pretty limited requirements:

1. Bare-bones URL bookmarking, available over the web
2. The ability to categorize bookmarks
3. The ability to publish categorized bookmarks as separate RSS feeds
4. Easy browser integration, either through a bookmarklet or a browser plugin
5. Functional across all, or at least most, web sites

And I ended up, a little to my surprise, at one of the older players in this sandbox, Delicious (formerly the less sonorous but more Web 2.0-y “del.icio.us”).

I like the spartan interface, the simple black-white-blue color scheme, and the snappy responsiveness of the site itself (though, honestly, I’m not likely to visit it that often). The Firefox plugin is a bit busy–it added three buttons and a whole ribbon of things to the top of the browser–but I may be able to tame it with configuration. And I like the simple, straightforward bookmarking and tagging.

I also like that each tag can generate an RSS feed. Since the Furl migration, I’ve been using Yahoo! Pipes as a hedge against a day exactly like this one; I’ve created a series of pipes to generate RSS from my bookmark sources, and added these feeds to my various publishing tools rather than the original feeds themselves. I was able to update my pipes, adding the Delicious feeds, and hey presto! migration was achieved.

And, even better, I don’t see any of the annoying “social” tools that I’m not particularly interested in. I already use Facebook to keep in touch with some friends and neighbors, and Twitter for sharing information with far-flung and like-minded people; I don’t see the value in turning every web page into a potential “look at me!” exercise.

The modern web is inherently social, and in many ways that’s its greatest shortcoming. Perhaps I’m just a crusty curmudgeon, but I do firmly believe that “none of us is as dumb as all of us”: making the channels of communication ever more open does not help to improve the quality of that communication. The Diigo “sticky note” feature proves as much.

This exercise also helped me to sort out the ways I use “bookmarking” on the web: the relatively simple concept of storing and organizing URLs has a lot of implementations, of which I use several.

For the more permanent bookmarks–the sites I visit regularly (Google Reader, e-mail, banking, etc.)–browser bookmarks make the most sense. They’re integrated into the browser address bar (at least in Firefox), always available, and easy to organize. I use the Xmarks plugin to synchronize these links across desktop, netbook, and work browsers.

Sometimes I need to bookmark something that requires more in-depth reading at a later date (a great New York Review of Books article that demands some thought, or a technical document on XML configuration to solve a work problem), but that doesn’t merit a permanent bookmark. I’ve found Instapaper to be a good place for these kinds of bookmarks; it has a nice, unobtrusive bookmarklet for quickly storing things for later perusal.

And finally, there are the transient bookmarks, the trail of items that have caught my eye but may not be worth saving for long. It’s helpful to have a common place to store these links, and a way to go back over the history to find things, but they don’t need to be available all the time. Furl served this niche nicely, as did Diigo for a while; Delicious, I hope, will serve it for some time as well.