Integrating Diigo and Evernote is possible with a service like IFTTT but nothing beats product ownership

I wish Diigo was a product by Evernote.

Evernote is a brilliant note-taking app. It’s all about getting out of the way of note-taking and being a second, much bigger and efficient brain.

I’ve used Evernote as a premium user for years (including throughout college) and have never felt the need to reconsider my subscription. (Ok, maybe only once or twice, when news of privacy violations leaked, and when they killed the image annotation add-on Skitch.) It’s fast, relatively bug-free, and most importantly, gives someone with the memory of a goldfish like me a superhuman memory.

Diigo is a social bookmarking website that I use to annotate web pages in a buttery smooth way. When I read web pages and want to annotate a page, I can do that with ease and have those annotations both show up on the page when I revisit and appear in my Diigo account’s list of annotations.

I discovered Diigo several years after I started incorporating Evernote into my daily life, and when I did, I struggled for a while to reconcile the fact that Diigo is not by or a part of Evernote.

As a user, I feel bummed out. Although it rarely happens, sometimes we do find a product that feels like a natural extension to an existing product or service, and it’s like magic. That is until you realise the product is not made by said existing product or service. Bummer.

I’ll be more specific:

• Whenever I annotate a webpage, it’d be great if those annotations get synced to my Evernote account (instead of Diigo) so that I can have one, not two, external brains
• Ideally, the entire page gets clipped and synced with highlights and worded annotations to my Evernote account (Evernote Web Clipper does this partially, but doesn’t have inline comments)
• Diigo’s Outliner feature is amazing, and I wish Evernote had something similar that allowed me to create a coherent outline as I read different web pages for information about a particular topic

I realise I may sound a little unfair towards Diigo by saying all this, but I think I mean this as a compliment. Diigo is an amazing tool (and it’s free), and I’ll continue using it for its various killer features. I just wish they would integrate seamlessly.

As I am writing this, I did a quick search for Diigo and Evernote integrations and there seems to be hope after all, in the form of an IFTTT (if this then that) protocol. I know I’ll be trying that!

Hopefully, a team in Evernote is already working on something like this, or perhaps someone in their mergers and acquisitions team is busy… what, a man can fantasise, can’t he?

(Then again, it might add to Evernote’s five percent problem. I’m not sure how to reconcile my selfish want and their business strategy.)