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Business Knowledge Sharing Community – Diigo

Billed as a research tool and knowledge-sharing community, Diigo (still in beta) has many of the same bookmark-sharing features as Ma.gnolia. You can tag and share your bookmarks with your friends and colleagues, and find new people to connect with in the social network. Unique to Diigo, the ‘People Like Me’ suggests people with similar interests based on tags and bookmarks. Suggesting new people requires enough tags and bookmarks to work. However, importing bookmarks from del.icio.us (281) either did not work with this function or wasn’t enough information for a recommendation. Along with matching tags, connections can be made with others currently online, new to diigo, featured people or searching. Diigo offers browser add-ons to make adding bookmarks, comments, tags, etc. very easy.

Most impressive and innovative is the ability to annotate and highlight content on webpages which will appear the next time you visit the page or when you share these notes with others. This note-sharing functionality makes it possible to use Diigo to share research with colleagues and co-workers, which could be very beneficial in the B2B marketplace. If a webpage is of interest to your coworkers, not only can you bookmark and share it with them, you can highlight specific content and makes notes on the webpage which they can see when they visit. Your coworkers can then make their own notes and highlights, which creates a very powerful shared research environment. (This could also be very useful for web designers who could have their clients markup website designs with changes right on the website – no more faxes and pdfs!)

The layout and design of Diigo is not as polished as Ma.gnolia, but is fairly usable. Editing bookmarks that I imported from del.icio.us took almost 30 seconds to save changes. Using the browser add-on, adding a bookmark did not ask for any tags or descriptions (which del.icio.us does), and sent the bookmark to my unread portion of my profile. This seems strange since I was the one that added the bookmark. One would expect unread bookmarks to come from friends or coworkers.

Overall I think Diigo has some very promising functionality, especially in the annotations and floating sticky notes, but seems to be very slow to use. It is still in beta, so hopefully some of these quirks will be worked out to make it a much more useful tool for business websites.

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Diigo
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B2B Social Bookmarking – Ma.gnolia

Similar to Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia allows you to save and share bookmarks with friends and colleagues. However, Ma.gnolia takes the social aspect to a new level and has a very easy-to-use intuitive design.

Ma.gnolia is truly a social place to trade bookmarks. You can find, join and start groups with similar interests, which share people, tags, and links. Tagging is an integral part to any social bookmarking site and ma.gnolia integrates tags throughout their website, presented in tag clouds so you can easily see what the group feels is important. Almost every page has a featured linker to provide you with both a new person to link up to and new content to look at. Ma.gnolia makes it very easy to find new people and to see what the community finds interesting.

Ma.gnolia’s design is both beautiful and easy-to-use, making it fun to browse around looking for interesting sites or people. Your profile homepage shows recent bookmarks from you, your contacts, and your groups all in one place. Exploration is encouraged with lists of recent bookmarks, hot links and hot groups. Links can easily be imported from del.icio.us and login is a breeze – using your choice of openid, yahoo, facebook, clickpass, wordpress, livejournal, aol or typepad.

Adding bookmarks is easy with several ‘bookmarklets’ which are links you can add to your browser. One of these, Roots, also lets you see what the Ma.gnolia community thinks about the page before you add it – tying you to the community even when you are browsing around the web. Sharing your bookmarks on your website or blog is also easy, with a wide variety of officially supported Add-ons and a large community creating their own in the wiki.

Adding a social bookmarking service to your website or blog is a great way to easily add content and connect with your readers. Ma.gnolia also offers a way to increase traffic to your website due to the large community and social functionality. If you’re looking for a robust social bookmarking service for your blog or website, take a close look at Ma.gnolia.

 UPDATE: You can take a look at my ma.gnolia profile to get a feel for how it works.

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B2B CDN Review – LimeLight

I will be wrapping up the CDN segment today with a look at LimeLight Networks. Limelight’s technology is similar to other CDN’s available on the market. A bit too similar, as they just lost a big patent violation case filed by Akamai. Shares are down since the announcement, and things are looking grim in Arizona. So why are we even talking about them?

Customers: LimeLight has Microsoft, one of the largest clients in the Content Distribution game. The XBOX 360 is a media sponge with a loyal, content craved fan base. When you serve up the largest online market for console games in the US, it means something. So the fact that they just signed last year Sony, the soon to be second largest online console market, gives this company some serious clout. Enough to say that either on their own or though a buy-out, LimeLight will be around in the future.

Their Services: Much like any other CDN, LimeLight offers its customers Content Delivery. This is no different than CacheFly’s service, maybe better situated and built out, but the same offering. Unlike other CDNs, LimeLight also supports a proper Streaming Service for its customers (see previous CacheFly post for reference). It follows up its service with an a-la-carte offering of options in its Custom Service. Here you can dedicate servers and control specific option. These are much needed options in the CDN market. Other players in the market have horizontal offerings that go way beyond what most B2Bs needs for their content. LimeLight is playing in your space.

Having said all that, these are the issues and why I think you are still okay with LimeLight.

The Patent Dispute: According to a PC World article, the patent violation deals with Global Hosting system only and not the CDN portion of their business. The Massachusetts U.S. District Court has ruled that LimeLight did not violate Akamai’s CDN patents, as was originally claimed in the suit, only the global hosting. Long of the short of it is, they have a valid CDN business. Going in with eyes open.

Liquidity: Choosing a CDN parter doesn’t mean you are picking out china patterns together. Content is fluid, easily redirected. Using LimeLight now does not preclude you from moving to someone else in the near future. They use one-year contracts, but those become null in the event of an injunction anyway, so as long as they can meet the terms of the SLA (Service Level Agreement) you have little to worry about.

Personal Take: Litigation aside, this company hits a sweet spot right now. My personal experience with LimeLight is limited, but I have heard good things about their customer service from friends in the biz who use them. Their price points are not published, lending to a more traditional model of molding offerings and prices to individual customers. Numbers that I have seen put simple FLV HTTP progressive downloads under one and a half dollars a Gig. Your mileage may vary. In my opinion that number is competitive. The judgment of $45 million against them is concerning, though an appeal is possible. This company has a $100 million yearly revenue stream and enough major players to continue to run their business. Short on an injunction against what they do today on the CDA side, I think they should be considered a player in the B2B space.

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Limelight Networks
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