Sam Davyson

Ma.gnolia is the new bookmarking service that promises to make bookmarking more social, more fun. Their tagline is “Found is the New Search”. Bold hey? Certainly sounds so. But it is just bookmarking right? Like the del.icio.us we all know and use. So what is Ma.gnolia’s big pull? Well apart from the cooler interface than del.icio.us, on the social side of things, Ma.gnolia seems much better equipped. It has groups of people sharing bookmarks. It has personal profiles. And it has everything syndicated onto your land page when you sign in. Neat.

First things first though. You’ve got 6582 bookmarks (yeah, you’re a heavy surfer) saved and tagged up in del.icio.us. That is a hell of a load of bookmarks. Far too many to even think about manually moving them across. Here Ma.gnolia works well. There is an import function. And it allows you to upload all of your bookmarks from a xml file that you can pull from del.icio.us (or various other services). Once they are uploaded Ma.gnolia gets them processed so you don’t lose any of your tags, comments or links. Great. It even offers you a little box to put in a tag that you would like to apply to all of your imported bookmarks. Like “imported” or “frombefore”. I am not really 100% sure why you would want to do this, but I did it anyway. As you might imagine it is now my far the biggest tag in my collection.

Now I have got my bookmarks in I see that there is a link to edit my profile. Here I can enter personal detais for public show, choose an avatar (or upload one) and update my email receiving settings. Now a navigate over to my bookmarks again. Using the tabs (actually text links, but they serve as tabs) along the top of the interface. This gives me the page with bookmarks from me, from my contacts, and from my groups. This is largely identical to what Flickr does with photos on your main page. I can focus onto just my bookmarks by clicking “View All”. To the right is still some syndicated content along with a box to search through my bookmarks with and another box to allow me to add to my bookmarks. In the list of bookmarks itself there are more differences from del.icio.us. There are icons under each of the titles for the bookmarks to allow you to quickly do a few things. You can make a bookmark private (or not), send it to someone, or send it to a group. There is also a set of stars to allow for an instant rating out of 5 to be given. This is neat and useful. Rather like the stars in Gmail, but this obviously allows for more detail in your dishing out of importance.

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Now you can click the title of any of the bookmarks or the arrow nextdoor and you whizz off to wherever the bookmark is. That is how it should be. I am really glad that Ma.gnolia doesn’t make you move through a “jump” page before you hit the actual content. Those users that are particularly observant will notice that the URL of the page that you go to is not however the link that you bookmarked. (This is what made me think jump pages were in place). Infact Ma.gnolia sets up some sort of “wacky” URL for each of your bookmarks. Like http://ma.gnolia/bookmarks/fotuscaje is one of mine. Then it appends a /dispatch, and that makes the page whisk you off to where you should be before the page loads. So the page where I view the details for the bookmark is simply the address without the /dispatch. This is shown in the screenshot below.

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As you can see there is no equivalent of this page in del.icio.us. You may think there is. But no, this is just a page for viewing the details of the bookmark. It is not a page for editing the bookmarks details. You can see that the short link (as it is called) is shown in this profile of the bookmark along with a description, a little image (there is no way I have found to control what is shown for these. It seems to show a screenshot), the URL, your tags on it, your rating, and other people that have bookmarked the same link. Lots of stuff.

You will also notice that there is a button to edit the details. And when this link is clicked a /edit is appended to the “random” address (“short link”) and you can edit what appears. Change the address, the description, the tags on it, etc. I very much like this openess with the URLs. It reminds me of both del.icio.us and Flickr. This creation of random words for the bookmarks themselves is something that I havent however seen elsewhere. Flickr using random numbers for this kind of thing, and del.icio.us uses a URL that incorporates the bookmarked URL, to give something that isn’t neat or nice looking. Overall I’d have to say that this technique from Ma.gnolia is probably the best solution of the lot of them.

Now moving over to the Tag link at the top. I can see a tag cloud of my bookmarks. All of them are sized to suit the regularity that I use the tag. This has all been seen before. Unfortunately because I opted to tag everything I imported with “imported” it is by far the largest tag, and therefore every other tag appears approximately the same size. This is a bit of a blow, and the effect of the tag cloud is pretty much lost. I think, I know, I’ll get rid of that imported tag. No such luck. In this release anyway the capabilities to edit or replace tags in Ma.gnolia just doesn’t exist. Clicking a tag in the tag cloud lists every bookmark tagged with it. There is no “change this tag” option that I can see anywhere at the moment. Now I fully expect this to be implemented fairly soonish as I feel it is a fairly essential tool to the major bookmark tagger.

In the support and tools page you find instructions for adding a “bookmarklet”. Personally I don’t use the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox so I prefer to bookmark the link that they give you and then set up a keyword (in this case “m”) so that I can just type “m” in the address bar at any page and it gets bookmarked in Ma.gnolia. On this page they also offer bookmark import/export and a greasemonkey script to add a link to every entry on del.icio.us to “Add to Ma.gnolia”. A neat idea. I didn’t try it. But I can imagine how it works.

The social side is much harder to sample in a quick play around with the service. Obviously there are key things. It has profiles. These have all your tags on, your avatar, your recent bookmarks of course, and your nickname (you make this at the start and cannot change it, it forms part of the URLs for some pages — like your profile). It also has a messaging system. And a mechanism to keep track of your friends in the “People” area. This side of Ma.gnolia all depends on how people use it. They can provide the services but in the end it degree to which the users get into it. What use is a social bookmarking system if no one is in it? This is the great success of Flickr. It makes photos social. Interestingly enough whether Ma.gnolia takes off depends largely on how good the other side of it is. How good the bookmarking system, the tags, the stars, the interface all are. That is what will determine if people use it. And once they start using it the social side will really be able to kick off. I am certainly, for the moment, going to start using it for my bookmarks. We’ll have to see how the service develops.

Finally I must say: it is quite buggy at the moment. During the write up of this review I had numerous problems with the site. Technical issues. Lets just hope their ironed out before this thing goes live. As it has a lot of potential. Too much to waste.

Update // I am still using Ma.gnolia. And no more technical issues since my post. I have integrated my recent bookmarks into the sidebar of the blog. You can see these on the right.