Knowledge Plaza vs. Diigo: more than social web annotation
Don't mix apples and oranges
During the Q&A of the recent Betagroup, one of the attendees asked the following question: How is Knowledge Plaza different from Diigo? We answered there and then, Knowledge Plaza and Diigo are totally different apps, with different goals and focus.
At the goal and focus level:
We are addressing the professional and business needs: we have developed an app that lets professionals and small companies develop a centralized / internal place where their employees, partners or clients (or all of them) generate competitive intelligence around all the items they upload, share, discuss.
Consequently, this focus determines the differences found at the feature level:
- It’s not only websites, but documents, pdfs, images, emails, vcards, etc. what you can upload.
- Each item (we call it tiles, like a puzzle!) becomes a social object for it can be shared, commented, annotated and discussed.
- You can relate these tiles, creating an connected network of social objects.
- Collaborative discussion and creation is enabled by ‘mosaics’. A mosaic is a wiki-like feature that let members work collaboratively on a topic and relate it to tiles, etc. It is probably one of the most successful features (from our experience at KP Enterprise) for it’s the place where information turns into knowledge, by doing, sharing and discussing.
- Create workspaces members can join, focusing on specific areas.
- There is a very solid and flexible tier of permissions: you can set who access what, what’s visible or not. It’s not white or black, something like you either see an item or not. Contrarily, let’s imagine for a second that I have a a workspace on ‘experimental products (or services)’ where members are sharing stuff (docs, reports, diagrams, websites, contacts’ info, etc), and I have other workspace where I have invited partners etc. I decide whether I want my partners to see items shared on experimental products or not at all, if I grant them ‘access’, that accessibility can be full or limited, etc. There’s more to visibility than private vs public!
- You are given your instance, with a unique url.
- Different roles can be created. Of course that’s up to the administrator or owner of the instance.
- It runs an amazing search engine: You find anything (relevant to your search, of course!)
- Everything is RSS enabled, and you can create alerts and watchlists.
- Export information as pdf.
- Yes, of course, there’s a bookmarklet that does everything for you, fast.
- Yes, of course, there’s a real-time dashboard where you can monitor what your network members are sharing and even doing (with the selective twitter status feature).
- And a lot more…
But that’s only at the feature level. We have developed an app that’s flexible, and that’s why pretty much diverse companies from very different sectors are benefiting from it. For us the most important factor is what these companies are getting at the usage level, a place to engage with your colleagues’ knowledge and information and grow competitive intelligence.
Thus, to sum it up: Knowledge Plaza isn’t a social web annotation service. But a lot more.
Go and try yourself. Register for our private beta here.
