This week I’ve had the opportunity to experiment with more tools than I have in the previous weeks. This week I’ve been examining Digg, Diigo, and Delicious. All of these tools seem to be filtering tools and are formally called social bookmarking sites (i.e. sites that allow you to filter information on the web based on your interests). They all use the terms bookmark, tag, etc. The social aspect of the sites is that they allow you to have “friends” and you can see what you’re friends have been reading, what they’ve been interested in, etc.
While I can see the similarities in the tools, I’m still trying to figure out the differences between them. Why would someone choose one over the other? For me it all comes down to a few things: layout, functionality, and who’s using it. If the graphics are too overwhelming, I don’t want to use it. Is there a functionality that I really like and does the site do it well? Say I really like the annotation feature Diigo offers and none of the others do (don’t quote me on that), I’m going to use Diigo over the others. And finally, who’s on the site? If all my friends use Digg, chances are I’m going to use Digg to.
What reasons do you have for using one web 2.0 tool over another?
