[UPDATE: Please be sure to read the comments for a discussion on this matter between existing users of Diigo, Diigo staff, and myself. ]
I deleted my Diigo account tonight after a period of only a fortnight. I’ve heard many great things about the application as a better version of Del.icio.us with support for group collaboration and was inspired to check it out when it was suggested as a potential tool for the Facilitating Online Communities course I’m presently taking.
Based on the little I saw of the application it did bear promise, however then I began to receive notifications that people had accepted my “invite” to use Diigo, and I got suspicious. This suspicion was exacerbated and confirmed when I myself began to receive the same invites, which were sent to my various email accounts. These read as follows:
Mike Bogle…is a member of Diigo and would like to send you an invitation.
To accept this invitation and register for your free account, please click and visit Create Account
If you haven’t already heard about Diigo, you can view a short introductory video here. As you will see, Diigo is both a powerful research tool and a knowledge-sharing community that allows you:
- to add highlights and sticky notes on any web pages, just as you can on books!
- to create and organize your personal digest of the web, and access and search it from anywhere.
- to create groups for collaborative research.
- to keep in touch with friends effortlessly and non-intrusively by sharing contents.
- to connect with others based on shared content and interests.
- to discover quality resources on any subject or get personalized recommendations.We’re still working every day to improve Diigo. We hope you’ll like Diigo. We do. And, it’s only going to get better!
Thanks
The Diigo Team
I didn’t send these, nor did I request they be sent.
As it turns out the application had spammed my entire contact list without my knowledge or permission, and I was receiving emails from people wondering whether it was legitimate. “It’s not” I said.
While I’ve heard many great things about the application by way of my edubloggers network, I have no patience nor tolerance for an application that abuses my contact list. It is simply unacceptable.
The unfortunate thing is several of my fellow students have begun to use it as a collaborative forum for my course. I may miss out on some of the discussion as a result of my departure from the application, however I have no interest in driving additional usage, nor providing recommendations for, an application that takes advantage of its users.
Yep, I’ve been of the opinion that Diigo is a little too much social bookmarking for my tastes. It just seems like too much of a good thing. Del.icio.us lets me save my own bookmarks for later use and let others choose whether or not to look at them.
Here’s someone complaining about the same thing. Make sure you read down to Wade’s response – blaming the user! Poor form.
I had flagged this to look at later. but now not at all.
tnks
You would have received one of the spam messages too if I’m not mistaken
Sorry about that. I’ll definitely think twice before using a tool that asks if you want to “locate people you know who are already using this application”. Very bad form, that!
Hi Mike,
It’s very strange and sorry to hear the trouble that you’re experiencing. We’re perplexed. Shortly after Diigo V3′s launch, thought we already have taken user feedback immediately, and properly re-designed the find / invite friend interface with both a “clear all / select all” checkbox, and even once one wishes to send invite by clicking “Add to friends” button, there will also be another confirmation pop-up box to reminder user to confirm their action:
Please see:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3181/2721665398_d290c74721.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3175/2721664212_7428a85d41.jpg
This kind of confirmation pop-up reminder also appears at registration and invitation area.
Please kindly advise where you have experienced the difficulty (ie. auto-sending invites.) In case there be any oversight on our part, we will also appreciate knowing, so that we can take immediate attention.
Diigo is a responsible company where we try to embrace and be quite responsive to our community users feedback. It’s our sincere desire to create a valuable knowledge sharing community designed with productivity and collaboration in mind.
We hope you wouldn’t mind assisting us to identify the issue, so that we can continue making diigo better and better, and hope we can welcome you back to the community!
Best,
Maggie Tsai
co-founder
diigo
I have seen this happening on a few sites, not just diigo (though I can’t remember which sites exactly now). It is confusing to have a ‘friend finder’ function which implies it just finds other people already using the app and then mix that with an option to mail all your friends who aren’t using the app. Even though the text box says it is sending invites, you are not expecting to go down this path if you clicked ‘find my friends’ (I haven’t seen diigo specifically so I’m talking hypothetically about similar social networking sites that mix friend finder with friend inviter which seems to be the case on diigo)
Mike -
I completely understand your frustration as I had a similar issue with LinkedIn, where it was partial user error and partial confusing instructions. However, I LOVE LinkedIn and that wasn’t enough to make me leave. Diigo truly is a powerful tool and I absolutely consider it one of my favorite 2.0 tools right now. I’m bummed that this was your first impression of it because I think if you had been able to truly use it more, you would have seen the value. Maggie and her team do an excellent job of responding to feedback – I really encourage you to work with her to try to fix this and then give it another try!
Of course, this is coming from a Diigo-addict, but I do think that if you can help the Diigo team fix the issue, it would benefit all and perhaps give you another chance to test the tool out and see all that it can do.
Hi Everybody,
Thanks for the thoughts and feedback, and Maggie I’m very happy to have Diigo’s perspective represented here as well. Especially when disagreements emerge I think it’s important that both sides of the story are clear.
Kate, I’m glad you jumped in here, because your opinions carry a great deal of weight with me. Personal recommendations are a significant thing with online applications, which in some ways is the source of my frustration with this situation really. They’re not something to be distributed generically in bulk during an account creation process.
In the interests of fairness I’ve gone back through the application creation process at Diigo and here are my thoughts.
First of all as Kate suggests, I’ve realised there was an element of user error in this. When searching for existing Diigo contacts during the account creation process the on-screen message does indicate that non-contacts can be sent an invite. However in my opinion the existing process for this is very unclear and makes an arguably false assumption about the default wishes of the user.
In the process, the user is given the opportunity to search for existing contacts by providing the username and login details for a 3rd party email client. Diigo then searches through the existing list of native users for accounts with email addresses that match the contact list of the new user.
A table is displayed that indicates which existing users are available.
On exactly the same screen though, and in the same table as the existing contacts, all other email addresses for non-existing users are included.
Additionally a message at the top of the screen indicates something to the effect of “you have friends”. While this is an accurate statement from the standpoint of existing Diigo users, it is inaccurate – or at worst misleading – in terms of non-Diigo users.
I should mention that there are notes related to non-users being sent and invite, and the column heading indicating non-users – however realistically, by including all this in one screen it exacerbates the possibility of user error and as such represents a usability issue.
In terms of my statement about a false assumption, here’s what I mean.
Mass user invites like this are geared far more towards the needs of the application than those of the users. It is unrealistic to assume that users will naturally want to send mass invites to their contact list by default, when arguably only the exceptions to the rule will.
The table that displays both non-users and existing users ticks ALL search results by default. Therefore when continuing to the next screen, ALL people are contacted.
Furthermore at the beginning of this process the new account holder is asked if they want “find out which of your email contacts are on Diigo” – not send invites to all your email contacts. The application then assumes that the users wants to send everyone a message by default – which is an assumption it cannot possibly make with certainty.
To resolve this issue and avoid similar complaints in the future I strongly suggest the following:
1) Break up the invite/friending processes. When I’m invited to search for existing Diigo users I know, that’s ALL I want to do. I don’t send recommendations and invites to people until after I’ve used the application for some time. I would hazard to guess that I’m not alone there.
In fact the existing (informal) convention I’ve seen used on dozens of other applications is at most non-contacts are listed but un-ticked by default. I’m not fond of this habit either frankly.
2) Include an ADVANCED option to invite non Diigo users that is NOT activated by default. This will give the option to the people who want to take advantage of the invite, while ensuring it is actually there desires that this happen.
3) Furthermore make it clear, via confirmation if necessary, that an email is being sent on their behalf.
On another note Maggie I appreciate the fact you took the time to stop by and present your thoughts and perspective on this. Dealing with disgruntled users is not a fun thing to do – believe me I have first hand experience there. And I must say you dealt with things very well and diffused the situation quite effectively – earning a reconsideration from the user in the process. Thanks for that.
Cheers,
Mike
Mike,
Thanks for taking your time to give us some thoughtful feedback. It’s very helpful, and we really appreciate it.
Some of our UI in these social functions are fairly “standard” design practices by other social media sites and we didn’t try too hard to “reinvent the wheel” there (though most of diigo core functionalities are quite unique and nicely thought-out.) But I do see where some potential user error / confusion might be… We will be discussing internally to see ways to further improve the process.
Kate, Thanks for your sharing your support and enthusiasm for diigo. It’s users like you that makes diigo community so special, and motivates us working even harder to make diigo the best it can be as both a great research tool & knowledge sharing community for all to enjoy!
cheers,
Maggie
Hi!
The exact thing happened to me.
I didn’t realise that by inviting existing users I will be spamming my contact list. Many of my students wrote me back asking me what the mail was about (our native language is Spanish) The invitation mail was even sent to my blog and posted there.