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Social bookmarking was one of those hot areas for a while back in 2006, as Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon exploded into popularity. Clones began to pop up everywhere, but few have managed to gain much ground.

That makes Diigo, a newer social bookmarker aimed toward information gathering that I reviewed last year, sound like something of a throwback. However, Diigo is releasing a new version today, and says it has a small but growing group of devotees.

Diigo is distinguished by its highlighting capabilities, which allow users to go through a page and mark certain portions. Users can also leave comments on pages, made visible by a Diigo plug-in available for most browsers.

That makes it great for research, but Diigo seems to be aiming at more of a mass audience with a set of new social networking and recommendation tools. Users can now join groups, send messages to each other and follow what friends are doing. Recommendations are provided based on your own bookmarking and existing tags and groups are available to search through, which can help new, friend-less users get started.

Diigo’s CEO, Wade Ren, told me that the service is getting some attention as a group research tool for people like teachers and marketers. It’s now somewhere north of 100,000 users.

Interestingly, Ren points out Delicious as the only competitor to his service that’s still innovating. However, it looks like traffic to Delicious is falling off, while StumbleUpon has spiked upward according to Alexa, Compete and Quantcast (click through for the charts). That may mean that the average user is actually interested in a less full-featured service.

Around the corner is Delicious 2.0 (coverage on that from TechCrunch), so we’ll soon have a chance to see.

Here’s the latest action:

Free mobile calls, via texting — An Ottawa company called bOK is using VOIP to give Canadians free mobile calls, using SMS. Here’s how it works: You send a text message with your contact’s phone number to bOK, and, just like better-known JaJah, bOK calls both parties — voila, free incoming call!

The service is temporarily free for any phone number in the U.S. and Canada. Anyone with a US-based phone plan, though, can expect to use up minutes. The service will work in Canada especially well, where many carriers offer plans with free incoming calls. The company charges for international calls at standard VOIP (low) rates. Maybe those with friends and families across the Northern border will appreciate this service? You do have to provide your phone number and other considerable data (from birthdate, to address), which is a downside.

The self-funded company emerged about a month ago and now says it has handled 10,000 calls and is breaking even; it hopes to raise a venture round shortly. Besides Jajah, other companies trying to redefine telephony include: Mobivox, Talkster, Truphone as well as Skype. bOK has decided to enter a very crowded market pretty late in the game, never mind any future legal issues. We like what it does, but wonder about its chances for success.

After patent score, Jingle makes a deal – Jingle Networks, the operator of a free 411 service, has partnered with Internet calling company Skype. In the US, Skype users will be able to use Jingle for 411 calls, and add “Free411USA” to their Skype friend list so they can call for a 411 operator — if they are on Skype version 3.5 for Windows. Jingle’s patent is for ad-supported calls, for when you don’t want to use a search engine on your web browser.

Local.com gets own patent for voice and mobile for directory-search assistance — Local.com, based in Irvine, Ca., was awarded a patent for a method of searching local directories on a pay-per-referral basis where users receive results via an operator call, SMS or a number of other options. It includes an ad model, and comes on top of another patent it received in local search last week. Previously-mentioned Jingle also offers SMS-based advertising; Microsoft’s TellMe and Google’s Voice Local Search, are also in the market.

Mister Wong, a clone of Delicious, launches private beta in U.S. — Oddly named German company Mister Wong is arriving Stateside. You’d think it would be called Mr. Schmidt or something. Next, here’s the dirt on this quirky sounding company: 1) It successfully copied the bookmarking site, Delicious, and developed a stable base in Europe; 2) It is trying to use this base to gain a foothold on the US; 3) We’ve heard that Delicious hasn’t grown much since it hit the 1 million mark last year. We’ll be watching to see if it goes anywhere. What we won’t be watching is the Alexa graph that Mister Wong provides on its splash page, comparing itself to such companies as gnolia.com, spurl.net and furl.net (see above). (More from Mashable)

South Korean search co. rules South Korea — Naver.com is the South Korean search engine of choice, and benefits from user participation in search results. While it handles more than 77 percent of all Web searches, search giant Google handles just 1.7 percent. The site is entirely in Korean; as far as long-term plans go, we can only assume that the company is aiming north.

Facebook traffic numbers are up 89 percent this May versus a year ago, according to Comscore – This isn’t surprising news to anyone who has been tracking Facebook for the last year, as the company has been disclosing its internal numbers (if those are to be believed, the site now has 28 million active users). We referenced the trend in March:. The most notable recent development: A huge chunk of new traffic is now coming from over 10 million adults ages 35 and up. This data may be suspect though because of a methodology problem: Total users don’t equal sum of the age segments listed (there’s a 1.2 million user difference). If true, it still suggests older people are joining, even though the site started in college campuses. Now, Mom and Dad apparently want to see what their kids have been up to for the past few years. Techmeme has more blogging about these numbers.

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Facebook Apps are getting translated – Facebook-focused blog Inside Facebook, points to an application, Nestoria, that’s entirely in Spanish, possibly the first non-English app. Facebook itself is currently English-only, although as more people have joined from around the world, they’ve brought their languages with them (like this Facebook group called I LOVE LEBANON). As the post notes, the company is trying to hire somebody to build out localized versions.

The latest action:

My Maps kills start-ups? — There is plenty of commentary about how Google’s new feature My Maps is killing off start-ups doing the same thing. The new feature lets you build maps. Platial and Frappr are already doing this. This doesn’t make Google an ogre, as some suggest. An ugly company is one that does due diligence on your company, under guise of possibly partnering or acquiring you, only to pull out at the last minute and replicate what you do. My Maps makes a lot of sense for Google, and it should have been obvious for start-ups (see VentureBeat coverage) that it was coming. Plenty of sites have incorporated Google maps, and are not in danger, because they do something very different from what Google will do. In fact, you won’t see Platial complaining too much because its own backers, Kleiner Perkins and Ram Shriram are actually represented on Google’s board. Platial, of Portland, Oregon, you’re recall, raised $2.4 million in a first of funding just last month. And Kleiner partner Randy Komisar has been saying openly that Web 2.0 companies with no model other than supported by Google ads are pretty much goners (Platial relies on Google ads, no less).

Will your jacket power your iPod? – Researchers in New Zealand have developed synthetic dyes that can be used as solar cells to promise to generate electricity at one tenth of the cost of current silicon-based solar panels. The photosynthesis-like compounds work in low-light, and may even eventually be incorporated into clothing, so that your jacket may one day recharge your cellphone. The research is still in the earliest stage, so will be years before this gets to market. (More here).

Latest climate report from Brussels: 2°C rise from today’s temperatures will cause the extinction of 30 percent of species — Another scary report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in Brussels, Belgium today.

Delicious releases latest extension for Firefox browser — For those who love bookmarking, worth a look.

Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate for VCs? — The Republican presidential hopeful has already has $23 million in the first quarter, putting him well ahead of GOP rivals like McCain and Giuliani, and just behind Democratic frontrunners Clinton and Obama, reports PEHub. During his Mass. governor campaign in 2002, his support came from the who’s who of the East Coast private equity establishment. (See
Romney_Donors1.xls)

Ask undercuts itself with Google campaign — The anti-Google advertising campaign by competing search engine company Ask.com has only demonstrated how inferior the search site really is. Shortly after the ads appeared, people noticed that searching for the word “Google” on Ask.com returned this comment: “Don’t be a droid — use different sources of information” next to a drawing of a man on puppet strings and a link to Ask.com’s anti-Google Web site. Ask’s Jim Lanzone says the link was put up by overzealous staff, and was quickly removed to avoid any doubt about the impartiality of the site’s searches. Too late. That sort of internal gaming has never happened at Google, to our knowledge — and it raises questions about what else Ask is tinkering with behind the scenes we’re not aware of. We’re the first to support the underdog. But Google’s discipline — fanatical, some would say — is one reason you can trust its results.

How basic is Twitter? — We don’t want to add to the hype, but Dave Winer, always a big thinker, and creator of break-through protocols like RSS, is taking a serious look at Twitter, the new company getting buzz for letting you message to the world what you are doing at any given time. Winer suggests it could be the basis for a new open communications protocol. Meanwhile, take a look at this 3D Twitter viewer (screenshot below), which takes Twitter’s messages and places them on a global background to give you a smattering of what people are saying around the world. It uses Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. It is just one of several viewers created since Twitter became all the rage at the SXSW conference in Austin, Tex. a couple of weeks ago.

Yoono is a tool that finds pages relevant to the one you are surfing on, and locates people who are also interested in that site.

This company is notable because similar players like StumbleUpon have become popular lately.

France-based Yoono relies on the goodwill of other users, however, requiring them 1) to download Yoono’s toolbar (and some users are now overwhelmed by toolbars) and then 2) give Yoono permission to search their bookmarks, which it then stores in its database. Yoono is a long-shot, we believe, because of these hurdles. However, after these two steps, there’s no more work required. In fact, your elderly aunt might figure this out — and she may not want to “tag,” which is the alternative used by other social search engines (StumbleUpon and Delicious).

Let’s take a straightforward example of how Yoono works. If you are surfing VentureBeat, you’ll see (partial screenshot below) that Yoono has searched its database for users who have bookmarked articles where VentureBeat is named. It then lists them in the sidebar at left, by relevance. VentureBeat broke the “Powerset” story, and so it is no surprise this story is high up in the article listings. At the far bottom of the sidebar, you’ll see links that Yoono has found in the bookmarks of people who have also saved VentureBeat as a bookmark (Gigaom and Techmeme are at the top; we’ve cut the screen, but dozens of other links follow).

Right now, there are no “Yoosers,” or people who have tastes that are similar to VentureBeat’s (likely because I haven’t opened up my bookmarks for Yoono to tap).

The company also has a “surprise” button, which is similar to StumbleUpon — it finds a site you might like based on the site you’re surfing.

Its business model is advertising. Ads will put in the sidebar. The company raised $2 million two months ago from AGF Private Equity. It has ten employees.

On Dec. 11, at the Paris Le Web 3 event, Yoono will add a blog search feature (which draws on the RSS feeds from sites contained in the 25 millions bookmarks in its database), and a new way to visualize the Yooser network (a control panel to search Yoosers by topic). The company says it has more than 200,000 users.

Wink, the social search engine that searches for Web pages that people have bookmarked, tagged or otherwise marked as interesting, has introduced a people search.

You click the people tab (see screenshot below), and you get results from three leading social networks, Bebo, LinkedIn and MySpace. You can filter by gender, age, and dating status — and you can see where this is headed.

This is a good move by LinkedIn to highlight its people search, because we’ve mentioned how Spock is coming after them soon. (Update: Turns out, LinkedIn had nothing to do with this - Wink crawled and indexed all publicly available LinkedIn profiles).

Great for flirting. But also convenient for older men on MySpace, known to prowl — and one reason for the surprising find that there’s so many older people using that site. Wink, of course, makes this even easier for the creeps, and it’s not like someone can opt out of being searched. (Update: Matthew Stotts provides a link to some helpful advice on this). VentureBeat editor “Matt Marshall” is No. 1 of 4,885 Matt Marshalls (we’re stopping the criticism), and I’m not even on Bebo yet — plus I apparently enjoy the luxury of anonymity (no picture).

Our first big mention of Wink was here.