I'm not sure who came up with the idea of "Favorites" - probably Microsoft (if not, I'm sure they took credit for it) - but they have been a staple since web browsing really got started. You go to the same websites a lot; you mark them as favorites. That way, you don't have to remember the address or go through the great big Google search that led you there in the first place.
Favorites are great. You can even keep them in folders for organizing, but the Web 2.0 revolution brought about some other challenges. Favorites needed to be accessed across multiple devices. It's not enough to be able to get to your favorites from your desktop. Why can't you have the same list on your tablet, and your laptop, and your other laptop? Some awesome innovators came up with a way to make that possible - and they coined the term "Social Bookmarking."
With social bookmarking (through sites like
Delicious), people could access their favorite bookmarks from anywhere, and they could even share them with friends. The people at
Diigo, however, have taken social bookmarking to a whole new level. Imagine a simple toolbar that you can install on all your devices which allows you to not only bookmark, but annotate and highlight information from any website. The best part - the next time you open that same page, the annotations are saved (on any of your devices). This means you can take notes on THIS article at your computer at home, and then pull up the article and continue annotating at school.
Imagine for a moment what this could do for your research paper/project organization. Take a minute to watch
this video to get a great visual of Diigo in action.
