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Review: Ma.gnolia Is The New Del.icio.us

posted in delicious, magnolia, review, web2.0 by Richard Glover on Fri Feb 17, 11:00 AM

Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service that on the surface is Yet Another(YA)del.icio.us, recently went from private-beta to public. Unfortunately, I was right in the middle of writing a review when this happened…another post idea down the drain. But, in light of recent criticisms lodged by raving lunatics, I thought it might benefit some small community of curious readers if I continued my musings. Hopefully, you will be saved the digging and tinkering that I went through to discover Ma.gnolia’s full functionality. Basically, Ma.gnolia picks up where del.icio.us leaves off and provides functionality I’ve often thought should exist (obviously, I wasn’t the only one).

Isn’t This a Web Design Blog

Yeah, so? Okay, you’re right. If you would like, you can skip to the section where I talk about design and layout. I can’t imagine you got here wanting to read that part of the review, though.

Whither Slogans

When the project started, the front page was very Web2.0 (see criticism): a simple page with a logo, a little large text (excuse the oxymoron), and a form beckoning you to log in (if you had been invited). No description, no information, nothing but an intriguing slogan (that apprently has since been dropped). “Found is the New Search”, the page exclaimed. Though I had no idea what Ma.gnolia was, that was enough to pique my interest. To understand what they meant, one can now venture to their about page (hidden in the small text at the bottom of the page) and read a genesis-esque story of the creation of the internet. Thankfully, this creation is only two days long, involves no resting or mosquitos, and is otherwise free of sacrilege.

What they are getting at is that the internet is a vast and powerful network, but it desperately needs some tools to harness and direct that power into making our lives simpler rather than more complex. Nothing earth-shattering there…in fact, I’d guess that is the explicit goal of virtually every application ever made. Still, arguing that you’ve discovered the answer to the problems that plague internet searching and sharing is bold indeed. I think Ma.gnolia comes closer to delivering than I expected possible.

Answer in the Form of a Question

This is what Ma.gnolia thinks it is solving about search engines. When going to google, you have to guess which words the thing you want to find will contain; and then the search engine, in a cold and calculated way, presents what it thinks is most relevant. The problem is that the engine only has algorithms that, no matter how good, give back an answer in the form of a question: “Are any of these close?”. Things like Ask Jeeves try to make the interface more conversational (with hilarious results if you actually try to have a conversation), but the effect is still the same. With Ma.gnolia, you don’t search content, you search tags. Rather than a computer algorithm, you get humans associating key words they know are relevant. Again, not really novel (at least, not anymore)—del.icio.us has had this feature for some time—so why is it worth advertising? In terms of my Web2.Blow rant, what differentiates this service?

In addition to your bookmarks and tags, there are other people’s bookmarks and tags. Still sounds like del.icio.us, which is true except the bookmarks are now much better. In del.icio.us, all you have is the bookmark, the tags, and the excerpts. Your only real clue as to how good the bookmark is will at best come from the “popular” section on the front page or how many people have bookmarked it (basically the same rating system). In Ma.gnolia, each bookmark is now its own entity with its own page. Clicking “view details” beneath a bookmark brings up its page (example). You can see a thumbnail of the page, how many people have bookmarked it, who they are, when they bookmarked it, and there is a 5 star rating system. When you bookmark a page, you can rate its value. On the bookmark itself, you can see its average rating; and within the bookmark’s page, you can see what each specific bookmarker thought of it. Finally, you can see any groups this bookmark has been tagged in, giving you access to similar threads. Suddenly this sea of tags is taking form.

Social Social Bookmarking

That is not a typo. As the front page advertises, “Ma.gnolia is a community of people and interest groups”. Although at the end of the navigation links, one of the first things you are asked to do upon joining is create an (optional) profile. This is no MySpace (thank god), but you now have a presence of some kind for people to relate to you. Your profile has standard info (names, birthdays, gender, homepage, blurb, etc.) and an avatar (75px by 75px) of your choosing. This is a public profile where people can see your info, your tags, your bookmarks, and other information concerning contact and group bookmarks that we’ll talk about in the next paragraph. If people like what you’re doing, they can even subscribe to your bookmarks via RSS or Atom! In one place, you can find interesting links and begin social networking.

Back to the normal flow of the navigation bar. After the bookmarks and tags links is a link for people. Because accounts have this added information, you can track down people with similar or intriguing interests and see what they think is interesting or useful on the web. If you find someone you really like, you can keep track of them by making them a contact. Now we are building a community. But most people are more complex than just one or two interests, and you may only be enticed by one or two of their interests, so our community is still lacking.

After the people link is groups. You can form groups around your individual interests and find like-minded people’s bookmarks that way. Interested in CSS? Try the All Things CSS group. Like beer? Take a look in the Beer group. I happen to like CSS and beer (particularly in combination), so I joined them both (as well as others). Groups can be public, moderated, or private, giving you full control over how they function. Individual members become managers and moderators. Now we have a bookmark sharing community.

[Maggie?] Don’t You Lose My Number

Possibly the coolest feature on Ma.gnolia is that it allows you to see your bookmarked page as you bookmarked it. It saves a copy of the page you bookmark (kind of like google cache, but it doesn’t update) so that the page is still there no matter what changes are made. Have a blogger that changes the content after the fact (mea culpa)? Like a page on a site that has gone offline? That is okay because Ma.gnolia has it in the exact same form as it was the day you added it. You find this feature in the “view details” page.

Fear Change?

Convinced it is worth a try? Good. But you’ve spent so long bookmarking in your browser and/or to del.icio.us (or somewhere else)...now you have to recreate all of that work to use another service?! Actually, no. You can save both your browser’s bookmarks and your del.icio.us bookmarks to a file and upload them (they say they are adding support for other links sites soon). It took me about one minute to fill Ma.gnolia with every bookmark I’ve got. If you don’t want all of your del.icio.us links, there is a Greasemonkey script for moving individual selections.

Worried because some of your interests are more nefarious or perverse than you would like the public to know? Every bookmark you tag is marked “public” or “private” (public by default) to determine if it displays to everyone or just you. If you choose to make your group private, it will be your own exclusive community. If your concern is privacy in a broader sense, you may want to peruse their privacy policy where they swear that they will only use your personal info for good (or awesome) and that your info is protected by SSL and digital certificates.

Don’t want to be bothered with manually submitting a page to your Ma.gnolia account? Well an app wouldn’t be very Web2.0 without a bookmarklet. In fact, as of this writing, they have two bookmarklets—”mark” and “snap mark”—so you can fill out the full bookmark info, or just bookmark it and come back to it later for the details.

These and other topics are covered in their support and tools section.

Interface

There is a large amount of information the system tries to put at your fingertips…so how do they go about doing that effectively? To start with, they take the first rule of design to heart: they keep it simple. The colors are soft and they avoid clutter (which can be hard to do with so much information). Most functionality information is communicated visually rather than verbally, and their icons are quite intuitive. Of course, that is to be expected from a place as prestigious as Happy Cog.

The page layouts follow what average users most likely are looking for. The front page gives you the general view: what is popular, what are we featuring, finally what is most recent. Your individual pages flow from specific to general. What are you bookmarking, what are your contacts bookmarking, what are your groups bookmarking. Furthermore, there is a “less detail” link to hide the extraneous info if things are feeling too tight. They spent their time making sure the system is user friendly, and it shows.

Summary

I’m sure I’ve not yet found all the features and functionality of the system, and I’ve only highlighted the basics here; but after playing with Ma.gnolia for a few days, I’ve found it quite useful. For reasons they don’t advertise in the “about” story (someone is really missing the point here), it streamlines my search for information. It is no replacement for search engines (yet), but it is a fantastic place to find news and information.

One thing I find lacking so far (which they will hopefully fix soon) is that you can’t submit bookmarks to groups from the bookmarklet form. You have to go into your page to place your bookmarks where you want them. Overall, it is a mild annoyance that is overwhelmed by the benefits of the system.

Devil’s Advocate

Since my review is so gushing, I thought—in the interest of fairness—I should link to a criticism. The Itchy Lot has a list of thirty issues with Ma.gnolia that is worth reading. I don’t agree with all of them, but most are fair.