Update (03/29/06): Diigo has had many updates since this review. Please stick around for a new review coming this week covering the many new Diigo features.

I’ve been testing a new social bookmarking service, Diigo, and found that it is actually much more then just social bookmarking but an annotation tool as well. I come across many websites, bookmark them, tag them, and then forget why I bookmarked them in the first place. But with Diigo, you can save notes to highlighted text on a page and even view a rough copy of the site in text-only format (which they call a snapshot) at the point of bookmarking it. There are also many more features and I will go over a few of them with you. The service is currently in private beta, but if you would like to see a simple demonstration, you may want to view their flash tutorial on how to use Diigo.

(Click to enlarge)

The main interface is nicely organized and provides a ton of functionality. When first logging in, you will get directed to your bookmarks page where you get a list of your recent bookmarks on the left and tags on the right. You find with each bookmark that you can view seperate tags, the snapshot (text-only of page at time of bookmarking), view others who have bookmarked the link, and even add comments to each link (also showing comments from other users). Another section of Diigo is the community, which is basically just all the bookmarks made from other users along with their tags, just like any other social bookmarking service. But what I like is when you view bookmarks for an individual tag, you will see a button show that says, “subscribe.” This isn’t a button to subscribe to an RSS feed, although there is RSS feeds for bookmarks, but it is a button to have Diigo take note that you want to keep up with bookmarks that are tagged with that tag and view them through Diigo. So for example, if I wanted to keep up with “Ajax” and “Web” bookmarks, I just subscribe to the tags. Then when I view the subscribed page, I will see all bookmarks for all tags that I have subscribed to. This is great because I can view only bookmarks that I find interest in that have been bookmarked by the community. But enough about that, how do you actually bookmark?

Bookmarking is very simple because of Diigo’s excellent toolbar that is available for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Flock. There are five main features with the toolbar that have proven to be very useful. First, and most importantly, is the Diigo button that will let you bookmark the page you are on. When clicking the Diigo button, a popup will come up letting you set tags, specify whether it is to be public or not, and also allow you to add comments to the bookmark. The button also will change icons depending on if you have bookmarked it already or if others have left comments for the page. The next button is the Links button which lets you show bookmarks for any tag from your bookmarks or from the community. I like to picture this being like a dynamic bookmark folder in Firefox that will show the latests bookmarks with the tag selected. Next is the Inbox button which is my favorite feature of the toolbar. The Inbox button will list the latest bookmarks that match your tag subscriptions that I described earlier. Everytime a new bookmark has been made that is set to a tag you are subscribed to, it will add 1 to the Inbox counter and bold the number marking it to show unread bookmarks. Its like an email inbox for bookmarks. Very cool. The next button is the search button that will let you search using many search engine services grouped in specific categories. For example, I can search for the word, “Ajax,” in Diigo, del.icio.us, Google, Technorati, and a lot of other search engines. And lastly you have the highligh and find button which will let you highlight and search for any text on the current page you are viewing. To use the highlight and find feature, you just type in the textbox that you use for normal searching but this time either click on the button for each word of the search term or the highlighter button. It sounds like a lot involved with the toolbar, but really once you start to use it, you will grow to love it.

I mentioned that Diigo is not only a social bookmarking service, but also a social annotation service. Diigo lets you highlight any text on any site and bookmark the page saving the highlighted text. Once the bookmark is saved, the next time you visit the bookmarked page, you will still see the text you highlighted, but this time with a blue underline. You can save multiple highlights on a page and even save sticky notes to each highlighted text area that you saved. This is excellent because there are many times that I have wanted to keep a note of something specific on a site and couldn’t and later on forget why I bookmarked it in the first place. Now I can keep notes on pages so I know what I was thinking at the time. On top of all of this though is that you can set public sticky notes. Meaning that when a Diigo user is to set a note to public on a page, any other Diigo user will see the note as well when viewing it. I also should note that in order to save a public note, you must have atleast two friends to help cut down on abuse with notes on sites.

Diigo has many other great features. One feature that caught my eye was the importing of bookmarks. Instead of importing a saved file to Diigo, it will actually open a popup listing all your bookmarks from your browser and let you import each on all at once or individually. It also tags them all by default using the tag, “Links” along with the name of the folder it was found in from your bookmarks directory. This is great because I don’t have to make any file or anything to import bookmarks. Another feature that I thought was interesting search page for Diigo. Diigo has searching in the interface itself, but unlike other services, it also has its own search page that lets anyone search Diigo (even if you aren’t a member). Instead of showing results in the Diigo’s website itself, it will show results on a page in a format much like Google’s which makes it a whole lot better, in my opinion. Another feature that Diigo has is friends. You can add friends to your bookmarks page so you can easily view their bookmarks when you want. But I personally would like to see a bit more functionality with friends to something like what BlinkList has done. When viewing the main page (or community in this case), BlinkList lets you click on the friends icon which will then filter all the favorites to show only bookmarks saved by your friends. This allows you to view only bookmarks from people that you know and trust. It would be great if Diigo can do this as well and I feel it would fit quite nicely with the service.

Overall, Diigo is an excellent social service that allows you to annotate, bookmark, and discover bookmarks and is currently in private beta. This will prove to be very useful for when taking notes on services I want to write about in the future. You may also want to view what TechCrunch and Library Stuff has to say about Diigo, as well as a look at the Flash Tutorial to see how it works.

View Diigo: Social Bookmarking and Annotation.

AJChat is a great and simple solution to create public chatrooms that utilizes Ajax to bring you real-time chatting. I have been testing around with it with Michael Arrington (See his review) and we liked it. The main thing that sparked my interest was that you can create your own chat in no time and then include it into your site. Simply go to AJChat, type in a name, and then click, “Enter.” So, I created a test SolutionWatch chatroom where Mike, Jeff Clavier and I gave it our rounds of testing. You can see a more active stream of communication going on over at TechCrunch’s Chat in his review of AJChat.

Overall, it seems to be a great solution. There were some issues here and there, and they mostly seem to appear when a larger audience is using the chat at one time. I experienced a repetitive comment problem and an alert error about max user connections that looked like a database issue. Some things that I think would be great is to allow for more customization if including into a website. Simple color changes and font settings would do. I also would love to see some type of notification of a new message. For example, if a new message is added, have JavaScript make the title of the browser flash on and off so it diverts some attention to it. Other than that, hopefully the creator can get some of the issues sorted out because it really is a great solution. Quick and easy. You can also keep up with the AJChat Blog for updates.

View AJChat - Simple Ajax-based Chatrooms.

Update: It looks like the server is down at the moment. Sorry! It was a lot of fun while it was up and we had a pretty active stream of conversation using it at TechCrunch. I saw a lot of familar names in it too, so it was pretty exciting to talk to everyone. The creators of AJChat have gotten back to me and said they are working on the problems, so lets hope that it gets up again soon.

Update: AJChat has made a post about the service being down. Here is a message from the AJChat Blog that states their service was deactivated by their hosting provider and they are switching to a new host soon.

Update: Kiat has informed me in the comments that the service is back up and running. Go give it a try. Arrington, up for another run? :)

Performancing released a new Firefox extension today that lets the user blog directly from Firefox using their simple to use editor. I gave it a try and it is excellent. The extension supports Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Live Journal, and Movable Type. It also appears that you can get it working for other services too. When enabling the extension, an editor will show up at the bottom splitting the browser in half. This is great because you can view websites, use tabs, and maintain your usual Firefox functionality all while the editor is open below. To get an idea of what is possible, take a look at the screenshot below (click to enlarge).

Getting started is simple. Install the extension, restart Firefox, open the extension and select the “Launch Account Wizard” button on the right under the “Blogs” tab. Select your blogging service and go through the steps. Once your blog has been successfully added, the blog will show up under the Blogs tab. You will also see that you categories and past blog posts are listed under the “Categs.” and “History” tabs. You will also see one last tab on the right called, Notes. You can use the notes area to obviously save notes, but also to save drafts of a post that you are working on.

On the left side is the editor itself. You can write in either a normal WYSIWYG editor or HTML format by selecting the “A” or “<A>” tabs at the top. When you finish writing, they also give a simple preview view that shows your posts title and content (No formatting, just default News Time Roman size 12). All of the normal WordPress functionality when writing remains. Buttons for bold, italic, underline, quote, link, image, etc.. When you finish writing, just click on the publish button and that’s it. Nice and simple, just how I like it. Another thing that I liked was that when you view the history of posts, selecting one will bring it up in the editor and then add a button, “Publish as Edit” next to the publish button that will allow you to edit the post instead of posting it as a new post.

Another feature that I just noticed is that you are not restricted to having the editor show up split screened on Firefox on the bottom. You can have it show on the top instead by going in the Settings area. Also, you can open up the editor in a new tab or window making it a full screen editor by right clicking on the icon for the extension and selecting the method.

I did have one small problem with the extension and a few minor suggestions as well. First, the editing of posts didn’t seem to work all that great for me. Content would edit perfectly fine, but in my test post I had an image left aligned and set it to a random category. When I edited the post, I aligned the image center, added the text, “Testing edit,” and selected a different category for the post. I clicked on the “Publish as Edit” button and it saved the post. When I went to check it, the image was not aligned center but the “Testing edit” text was there. I also noticed that the categories did not change. I went back to the post in the extension and the HTML and CSS for the centering of the image was gone, text was there, and the categories weren’t set. So, I guess there is still some issues with the editing of posts. Now for some of my personal suggestions/opinions. the phrase, “Publish as Edit” is a little confusing and I feel “Edit Post” makes more sense and follows the terminology of WordPress as well. Also, I would like to have the HTML view show in a smaller type and maybe in a font like Courier New. Maybe allow us to set a font? Another text related suggestion is that when previewing a post, links get some formatting, like an underline. Right now, linked text is the same font with no underline, so it is hard to see where the links are. No biggy, but I personally like to see where the links are. Lastly, I was working on a post and then wanted to check back on a note that I saved. Not thinking, I just clicked on the note to view the contents and then realized that I just overwrote my post I was working on. I would it that if you start writing, you can’t view a note or a post in the history without either saving what you are working on as a note or publish it. This way, nothing will be lost accidently. That about sums it up. Everything else worked great and Performancing for Firefox is definitely a very useful tool for blogging.

View the Performancing for Firefox extension. (via ProBlogger)

Update: Looks like the editing problems I am experiencing are restrictions by WordPress itself, but the categories still didn’t seem to edit. Performancing has more on Editing with WordPress.

PureVolume, a service created by Neubix of Unborn Media Inc., is my favorite source for music and has been since its initial release. It provided an easy way to find independent artists and allows you to download and listen to their music for free. They recently have released PureVolume v3 and have really done an amazing job. A new beautiful design, nice integration of Flash and Ajax, and on top of that, it now has social networking. You can signup as a listening and add bands and friends to your profile. You can maintain a blog and even create a photo gallery. Not only is PureVolume an excellent service for listeners, but also provides great exposure for bands - no matter the size of the band. I have found tons of bands from PureVolume and I can happily say that at least 50% of the music that I own has been found through the help of PureVolume.

If you are familiar with PureVolume, you will notice the new beautiful design consisting of simple gradients, dark colors, sIFR, and excellent implementation of Flash and Ajax throughout the site. But the main reason why I love PureVolume is because I can find music of any genre, signed or unsigned, listen to the artist through their Flash streaming music player (PurePlayer) and download the artists music for free if the artist has songs available for download. The service is free for listeners and bands, but if the bands want to step up their plan to PurePlus for a small amount, they are given more features, more space for storing music, and also given the opportunity to become a featured artist giving the band a large audience of new listeners that can hopefully boost their musical career.

Artists are given their own profile page that they can maintain their music, lyrics, photos, listings of upcoming shows, and even a blog. The main feature though that everyone loves though of course is the media player. Bands can upload mp3’s, group them by albums, and allow listeners to stream the music through the PurePlayer (screenshot above). If listeners like what they hear, hopefully they will add the band to their favorites, become a fan, buy the artists music, and maybe even spread word about the artist. I have PureVolume open all the time on my computer (it’s true, and I know my brother does too) and have certain bands that I listen to every day. You can open up the PurePlayer in a popup, which makes it a whole lot easier to browse around and still listen to the music. There are a few things though that I would love to see in the media player, although it may be asking for too much. Having the ability to add multiple artists to a playlist and have them play through the PurePlayer. At the time you can only listen to one band at a time, which I am happy with, but would absolutely love the ability to have a type of queue of artists to play.

I mentioned the use of Ajax throughout the service. You will see this nicely implemented when adding a band to your favorites, adding comments, or when viewing content. Content is layed out in tabs and to make the experience a lot quicker for the user, Ajax is used to grab the content of a tab when clicking it instead of refreshing the page. This is a great feature because you can now view other sections, like photos and the blog, while still listening to the music using the embedded PurePlayer. The old version of PureVolume did not have this so I was extremely happy to see the company take advantage of Ajax technology with their service.

So, what about the social networking that I mentioned? The whole social aspect is new to PureVolume but I think they definitely hit it off very well. When viewing an artist, you will see on the bottom right a container with the tabs, Fans, Friends, and Comments. Fans are listeners that have added the band to their favorites and Friends are other artists that are friends with the band you are looking at. This lets me see other people that like the music I like and see what other music they like. With the help of PureVolume allowing listeners to become fans, it makes the service even stronger when it comes to music discovery. Lets get a little more on the social side now, reaching to a point that compares with top social networking sites. Listeners can signup, add friends and favorite bands to their profile, maintain blogs and photo galleries, and comment on other friends profiles. Get friends, hear what kind of music others listen to, and meet people with similar musical interest.

Overall, I am loving the new version of PureVolume. I didn’t think their service could get much better, but clearly I was wrong. It is now a strong music and social community with over thousands of artist and music. Just a warning though that the new version of the site has recently been released and they are still battling server issues every once in a while. If you experience slow download times, small errors, or the server hanging, just give it some time and check back a little later. They are usually very quick with getting things sorted out. Otther than that, I am very happy with the service. As said before, I think it would be really cool to be able to set a queue or artists for the PurePlayer. Also, something that I would like to see is a feature that used to exist on the older PureVolume, the random artist button. On the old PureVolume, you were able to select a genre and then keep viewing random artists under that genre, but you can’t do that anymore on the new version and even though it’s such a small feature, it helps pass time looking for new music. A feature that I really like is in the Listeners area (need to signup), that if you enter your zip code, it will find shows in your area from the artists on PureVolume. It’s neat seeing all these artists showing up next to where I live and I am actually thinking of seeing one of them this month. If anyone wants to keep up with PureVolume’s news and developments, be sure to check out their Backstage Blog. That’s about it. Music and social networking in one. Excellent work, Unborn Media.

View PureVolume - We’re Listening To You.

Google has released a new feature embedded into normal search results that will provide a link to more details of a musical artist that lets you see pictures, albums, songs in each album, reviews, and more. The way it works is very simple. You happen to search for an artist and if Google is to match the artist, it will come up with an image along with a link pointing to more music results for the artist (ie: search for Yellowcard). This result will then direct you to the band page (still within Google Search) and list more information. Also, if you prefer, you can just use the Music Search to search an artist.

The first page that you will come across when viewing more results for an artist is the music search results. This is just the normal music search page but with the results for the artist you originally searched for. It will list possible matches for artists, songs, and albums all with pictures so you can easily narrow down your search. One thing that you will notice is that Google will be profiting from this as well (of course) because they provide links to purchase this music for services such as iTunes Music Store, Real Rhapsody, and eMusic (funny, I didn’t see any for Yahoo! Music Engine). I find it really helpful that they provide a link to the iTunes Music Store because now when I find a result, I can easily sample the music too with iTunes and if I wanted to buy it, I can easily do so.

Google came up with the artist I was looking for, Yellowcard, so I clicked on the artist result for Yellowcard. You should then see something similar to the above. You will see on the left that you can select views for all tracks or artist summary (in the screenshot, I have all tracks selected). You will then see more ways on the left to refine your searching with showing normal Google results (Artist Websites), Google News on the artist, a link to image results, and also results from user groups. One the right you will see all the artists albums listed by popularity. You can also sort by release date (my preferred). It provides links to purchase the albums and also lets you view the ablum songs by click on an album name, which will then also allow you to purchase each song individually. But what I found to be more interesting were the reviews. The reviews page simply pulls up articles that have reviews and ratings for the album you selected. I like being able to view the reviews to give me an idea of what other thinks about the artist and to help, you can filter the reviews by positive, neutral, or negative ratings.

Overall, I love the simplicity that Google Music Search provides. Many other search engines that incorporate some type of music search usually direct you to totally different websites for artist resuts. But I feel that Google did the right decision by keeping you at all times on the normal Google Search interface. I can easily leave and get back to what I was doing at any time. Yahoo! has artist results as well and the results Yahoo! provides are great, but what I do not like about it is that when viewing more results for an artist, it will direct you to their Yahoo! Music site. This makes me feel that I am no longer at Yahoo! but at some music website, when I would actually prefer to see results on the search page itself as Google has done. With Google, I feel like I haven’t left anything behind because I am still at Google search and the interface still looks the same (a comfort issue). Is it just me? Also, when you make the initial search using Yahoo!, the seperate links for artist results are harder to see because they get mixed up with the normal search results, while Google shows an image making it easier to point out. Lastly, I also prefer Googles quiet simply because I can buy music from other services while with Yahoo! you can only purchase for their music engine. But enough about what I like more. What do you think? Google may be a little late in the game, but as usual, their simplicity won me over.

View Google Music Search.

Update: Search Engine Watch has more on relating Google Music Search to other search engines.