DISQUS

LIsa Watson · 1 year ago

Agree. Too many web2.0 apps all compete users' limited attention, and more and more coming each day. Unless one has built a much better "mouse trap", relying on premium model for their revenue model ? nope, doubt they will have much a chance for being just an inferior me-too product in today's competitive landscape

Wade CEO Diigo · 1 year ago

I think it would be fair to say that Diigo is the most popular and
robust web annotation tool on the market today. With over half a
million registered users, It has been continuously refined over the
past three years.

So it would be helpful to compare any new entrant in the space to
Diigo. If webnotes is aiming at serious web surfers, then I must say
that side-by-side comparisons would show that Diigo is a much more
powerful (and mature) tool. For example, Diigo provides rich tagging
capability as well as folders for better information organization, and
provides group annotation for better collaboration; Diigo automatically caches
the page so it is always available to you; Diigo allows you to search
the full-text of your collections, or just within your highlights;
Diigo allows you to easily extract your research findings or publish
them to blogs .....

One could argue that webnotes' is simpler because of less features.
Well, if you want real productivity, I should like to argue that it
just falls far short of what Diigo enables. In addition, Diigo's rich
functionality has been designed with painstaking care so that you
will be completely comfortable just using a subset of the features to
begin with. For tools that are really simple, I would say delicious
and google notebooks are hard to beat.

Diigo team continues to dedicate itself to make Diigo the best tool
for research productivity and knowledge sharing. (In the meantime,
other web annotation tools such as fleck, i-lighter, jump knowledge,
trailfire, etc have essentially stopped development or simply
shut-down, to the best of my knowledge. )

Diigo has been a pioneer and innovator in social web annotation. You
will see us continue to innovate -- a lot more are forthcoming - stay
tuned!

Richard Crowley · 1 year ago

Justin, this is an appallingly poor article. Your laser-focus on WebNotes' entry into a competitive field does not give a single thought to their focus on serious researchers at the expense of oversharers. WebNotes is trying to be that "better mouse trap" Lisa speaks of - one that people will pay to use. I would welcome more web companies like them.

Owen Kelly · 1 year ago

I agree with Richard. I have been using Twine and after reading your review I went and spent ten minutes looking at Diigo. I would say that these two are businesses chasing the same customers using (approximately) the same feature set and business model.

IMHO WebNotes is very different.

Most importantly it is NOT a social site, although it allows sharing. It does not encourage you to make friends, or form groups as these other sites do. Twines, for example, are useful because they are topic-based threads to which other people contribute. They are "communities" and they are useful because I can find pages that I might not have found otherwise.

WebNotes is about what I do with this material once I have found it, and decided I may want to come back to it at a later stage.

When I store material it appears in an explorer-like tree accessible only to me. The folder structure enables me to store material as I would on my desktop or in a real-life filing cabinet. It allows me to annotate it (which among other things lets me remind myself why I stored it in the first place!).

This is a radically different conceptual model. It is not yet perfect in my view. Tags would be a useful additional feature for example to let me link material in more than one (folder bound) way.

This model may or may not work, and there may or may not be a market for it but I strongly disagree that it is a "me-too product", inferior or not.

Me? I have been looking for something like this - not instead of Twine but as well as Twine. I want to be able to leverage social activity to find material I would otherwise miss, but I also want to be able to store copies of that material in my own way in a manner that lets me access it later.

Wade CEO Diigo · 1 year ago

Richard and Owen,

The fact that Diigo has richer social features does not mean that Diigo is weak as a research tool. Please allow me to clarify a few points.

Diigo has much richer functionality for information organization, search and collaboration. Surely those are key parts of the research process.

Is Webnotes a better mouse trap? As a matter of fact, Diigo can do everything webnotes offers, plus a lot more, plus time-tested robustness.

Does Twine do web annotation? No.

Adam · 5 months ago

"Diigo has much richer functionality for information organization, search and collaboration."

Proof is in the pudding. I used Diigo for 6 months and found it to be clunky & disorganized.

Webnotes, by contrast, has the explorer tree, a strong search function and the option to generate a PDF report of some or all of your highlights and notes.

Your tough-talk isn't very impressive either.

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