Soapbox Rants and Raves

The pending demise of Delicious was blogged to death a couple of months ago. I too was saddened by Yahoo’s decision, having become quite dependent on this service. Like many, I began a search for a new solution, but nothing seem to be the perfect replacement. It now appears that Delicious will be sold off, but who really knows what direction it will take. I discovered Delicious a couple of years ago; I blogged about it, showed it to my friends, and used it as a “sharing” solution whenever I had the chance. I’m always looking for ways to be more effective and efficient, both remembering and information sharing. I’m not exactly sure why, but none of my friends were ever really jazzed about the tool or concept… I could only come up with a couple of possible reasons:

1. Many of my friends are Apple Fanboys… There must be something in that space that performs a similar function, maybe they have their own club!
2. None of my friends blog. Many of them read multiple RSS feeds, I guess they just read and run! They must be able to retain a lot more information than I can!

My environment and thought process must be a little different.

1. I live in an Apple free world.  I look for tools that work across platforms.  Dropbox is one of my favorites. It runs on my Android phone, my Ubuntu machines, and even those pesky Windows machines I have to support for the family.  Delicious provided effective plug-ins for most of the web browsers, and there were multiple options in the Android marketplace; this solution pretty much guaranteed I could find what I was looking for!
2. The more RSS feeds I read, the more topics I find to blog about! This is vicious cycle and quickly creates a backlog! It was so easy to create a simple bookmark in Delicious, and tag it for blogging.
3. Many times, I start reading an article and determine that it is too heavy and need some extra time to comprehend it. I just create another Delicious bookmark, and tag it for follow up.

After a lot of Googling for Delicious replacements and I landed on Diigo (My Library). I like the free stuff best and they also had a pretty decent Android application. Diigo has one feature that I have really grown to appreciate, the “Read Later” option.  If you find a web page that is interesting, but don’t have the time to read it, you simply click the “Read Later” button on the Diigo tool bar. Pretty simple! When you find time and want to catch up on your reading, you just go to your library and browse the Read Later items. I have not actually taken the time to use the notes and highlighting features, but am completely sold on tagging. Tagging seems like such an efficient way of classifying and searching for information; at least it works for me!  Diigo almost seems like a cross between Evernote and Delicious. It has many more features that Delicious, but the question is…. how will they survive?  I can only hope and might actually have to give them some $$$ to support their efforts.  My only rant is they do not provide a “tag cloud” view in their Android client… If they implement this view, I promise to become a paid member!

I still believe there is real value in the community, I’m not sure I will find one that is receptive, but I can always hope! There has to be value in exploring what your friends and coworkers are discovering and recording as important. I have to assume that much of that information is the bond which brings people together in the first place and ultimately enables them to communicate in a much more efficient and effective manner.

I highly recommend that you give Diigo a chance, and better yet, add me to your network!