diigo outliner

Posted by Marbux
Dec 18, 2014 at 12:56 PM

I’ve been using Diigo for several years. It is very handy for capturing clips from web pages, annotating them, and tagging them. Also for preserving copies of entire web pages if you are a paid subscriber. The outlining features are very new, and I haven’t really explored them yet.

My major gripes with the Diigo service all have to do with vendor lock-in features, i.e., the difficulty of getting your data out of the service for use in other programs other than by copy and paste. You can export data to several formats, but none of those formats allow you to export all data types. None of those formats are available via the Diigo API. [1] The API itself is extremely rudimentary. It enables a search of your own bookmarks (but not those of others if you are in a group) and can return the data for up to the first 100 responsive notes found. (No solution available for queries that would capture more, such as successive searches beginning with a specified note indice.) The API also enables adding new notes, but there is no capability to replace existing notes.

Thus far, there is no API capability to export/import outlines with the hierarchy preserved. I asked Diigo Support whether there were any plans to add that capability to the API and got back a “maybe someday” reply with the distinct hint that the suggestion was immediately deleted from the developers’ brains.

The vendor lock-in API limitations are a major disappointment to me. I would love to write an extension for the NoteCase Pro outliner that searches a particular Diigo group that I am subscribed to and returns all responsive notes (not just the first 100), creating a corresponding note in NoteCase Pro for each. After massaging the notes in NoteCase Pro, then replacing the corresponding notes in Diigo. The attraction of such an extension is that: [i] NoteCase Pro is far better suited for editing notes and their metadata than Diigo is; [ii] ditto for organizing information into hiearchies that make sense; and [iii] with NoteCase Pro’s HTML and RTF export capabilities, there’s a path to a word processor either online or on the local side. Best of all, NoteCase Pro embeds the Lua script interpreter and has some 350 program actions in its API, so the bulk processing of notes is both versatile and easy.

Diigo also loses points because they publicize only what its own development team creates; if there is a place on their web site to list third-party programs that interact with Diigo and the extensions needed to do so, I’ve never found it.

I can’t recommend Diigo because of the vendor lock-in attitude on its development team that could result in data loss if Diigo goes out of business. They really need to work on getting the program to the point that it’s as easy to get data out of the program as it is to put data into it. A far better choice until that day arrives is Zotero. Its API [2] is many miles out in front of Diigo’s. Zotero offers even more features than Diigo in the same market niche, all for free. And Zotero publicizes third-party programs and libraries that support its API right on the API home page.

In short, Diigo management has never caught on to two basic facts about software: [i] software interoperability is a rising tide that raises all interoperable boats equally; and [ii] vendor lock-in tactics treat users as victims to be trapped rather than as valued customers. So rather than moving to occupy the center of a sea of inteoperable apps, Diigo is destined to remain anchored in port. That’s a crying shame because Diigo has some very nice features; unfortunately, they’re all at the initial data capture end. Diigo has little to offer at the data usage end.

Best regards,

Paul

[1] https://www.diigo.com/api_dev

[2] https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/web_api/v2/start