Ma.gnolia and the hunt for a better bookmarking site
I have spent much time and looking for the perfect (at least for me) online bookmark archive and I still haven’t found it.
I received a beta invite to Ma.gnolia a few weeks ago and tried it out. My initial response was the same as Pete’s:
“So yes, it’s a good effort - but also a completely unimaginative one. ”
Ma.gnolia just doesn’t offer (at least yet) a lot to compel me to switch from the two main services that I already use the most (Del.icio.us and Furl).
But maybe there is some hope for Ma.gnolia.
Since I already know what I’m looking for in a bookmarking site, it didn’t take that long for me to check for some things and then send their tech support a pretty long email with questions and suggestions. A representative named Todd replied and his response was friendly. He seemd to genuinely appreciate the feedback and sounded like their team might actually take some of my recommendations into consideration. We’ll have to wait and see. I’m not ready to make the move yet until I see some innovation.
Ma.gnolia reminds me of Furl with tags instead of “topics” (folders). I give them major props for saving a private copy of the pages you bookmark, but that seems to be the main feature it offers that other services don’t (besides Furl and Clipmarks).
It’s not really designed for info-discovery, which is what Del.icio.us does a good job with. I think some of those info-discovery features are there, but they’re not promoted very well:
- The “latest” and “popular” lists of incoming links are in the sidebar on your main archive, under the space hogging “add a link” box (that should be less prominent because 99% of the time you’ll add links with the bookmarklet), and shown in small fonts, so I didn’t even see them until the second time I came to the site. There needs to be a separate space, a whole page with the ability to see older items as well, devoted to these things because they’re important… they’re not sidebar items.
- You can use a url to see a list of links under a tag and even a combination of tags like you can with del.icio.us (ex: http://ma.gnolia.com/tag/css+design) but nowhere on the site did I find information telling you that feature is available… I just tried it and it worked.
- They have a “group” feature that is relatively unique but no way to browse a list of all groups… you have to use the search and hope that you typed the right keyword.
- They have search, but no way to specify what kind of search… it searches everyone’s links… what if I am just searching in my own archive?
And my other beef (after asking in email) is that they aren’t planning on offering a browser toolbar like Furl (which is nice because it has a search bar right on it) or Clipmarks (which lets you choose parts of the page to save). The explanation was that toolbars aren’t available to everyone and they are often targets for hacks and exploits. While that may be true, they are also potentially incredibly useful depending on what you do with them and would be another thing to make Ma.gnolia’s service stand out from the pack. As for the bookmarklet that’s available to capture bookmarklets, there’s no innovation there either. You get can’t even really be put in a pop-up window like I prefer because the page isn’t laid out compactly so you have to scroll a lot to get to the entry fields and tags.
It’s unfortunate since I was really hoping there’d be more to set Ma.gnolia apart. Maybe now that they’re getting beta feedback their developers will try to add some more innovative features instead of just trying to depend on the fact that their site looks nice to entice people in. I’ll keep watching and hope it will continue to evolve.
February 17th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
I agree with your conclusion on Ma.gnolia. It just seems to be the same old thing but with a pretty twist. I go like the Groups feature though.
February 18th, 2006 at 6:08 am
Hey thanks for the thoughts. Our focus right now is on getting the foundations right, but rest assured we have some things I think you’d qualify as innovative coming in the next few months. I should add that Ma.gnolia is made for information discovery, but not in the same way as Del.icio.us. I think what you might have expected to see was a long, dense list of items. Simply put, we’ve build Ma.gnolia for people who don’t work well with that sort of thing. We’ve also taken a strong focus on people who are new to social bookmarking, and who aren’t web power users, so we haven’t really been concerned with communicating search construction through URL synthesis and the like.
If ‘more of the same’ is what you feel we’re offering now, then I’d invite you to check back in a couple months to see what we’ve been up to. We won’t be able to, and won’t try to be all things to everyone, especailly happy Del.icio.us users, but we do seek to go beyond the fundamentals and being nice to look at.
February 18th, 2006 at 11:16 am
Hi, I’m the developer for ma.gnolia.com. Since you noticed the URL construction, I’d like to mention a few things about it for you. It’s fairly easy to play with the search forms and see that you can search on multiple tags, terms, or a combination of both. What’s not quite so easy to realize is that you can also list multiple usernames or group names. We don’t expose these URLs in our features directly, but we obviously use it for “your contact’s bookmarks” and “your groups’ bookmarks”.
Also, if you compare our linkroll URLs to our search URLs, you’ll see the immediate similarity. Linkrolls are just searches with a different display. Likewise with atom and RSS feeds. Both of these are on cache timers though, so they will not update as quickly as a normal search page.
This is obviously very power-user stuff, so it hasn’t really been our focus. But it all exists because of my continued work on the backend RESTful API (and of course a SOAP variant).
March 1st, 2006 at 11:44 am
Todd and Dave,
Sorry for taking so long to reply and thanks for stopping by. I’m looking forward to seeing the changes Ma.gnolia goes through soon.
As a suggestion, if you have the power user features available as Dave pointed out then please make it all publicly documented. You’ll impress a lot more people who are currently scratching their heads and moving on, and it won’t alienate the more “average” users who generally don’t want to read documentation on how to use things anyway.
Also, just wondering if either of you had any thoughts on my ideal bookmarking service proposition. Feel free to incorporate any of those suggested features into Ma.gnolia!!
November 16th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
I have to admit that you have some very valid points to make about ma.gnolia vs de.licio.us and furl.
However, ma.gnolia has quickly become one of my favorites. I’m a designer at heart and in my eyes, the flow of the ma.gnolia gui is, IMHO, a little easier for me to follow.
Now, I totally agree that the groups, which is one of the best features I’ve seen, could be more easily implemented. I would like to see an “all groups” function that would bring my search time down, and I’m very excited about what the ma.gnolia group will come up with. I think that with some navigational and functional tweaks, ma.gnolia will be be in position to to really take some of the social bookmark crowd.