Solo Technology

Last month when I was looking over social bookmarking sites, I vaguely recall a reference to ma.gnolia.com. As I recall, they were in a closed beta. It would seem that they came out of beta today (this week?) so I decided to look them over.

Must confess, I’m looking at these sites with a bit of a jaded eye now. This is a damned crowded niche… which is a bummer really. I love the concept of social bookmarking and the more sites there are, the more “diluted” the folks are, except for those gluttons that use multiple services (which, to me, seems like way too much work!).

And, for a niche this crowded, I still don’t understand the business model. Or maybe there isn’t one? Maybe it’s just for the love of the data…

Ok, mini-rant over. Onwards!

Ma.gnolia seems to have all the expected bits. Signup is, as expected, painless. Presentation seems pretty “clean” and easy on the eyes. Perhaps not as much on the screen as the competition, but things are easy to understand and your eyes don’t initally cross from sensory overload.

The user has two options for migrating: Import browser bookmarks after exporting to file, or del.icio.us import. Now… this is a crowded market, and not everyone has lemming’d their way to del.icio.us… if I was entering a market at this stage in the game, I think I’d try and make it easier for more competitor’s clients to join me. Anywho, I fed it my local bookmarks file just to see how the import would go. Instantaneous would be an apt description, so that was a good sign. I tried importing a blinklist backup, but, as suspected, there still are no bookmark clients that can use that damned thing… the one big strike against the Blinklist lads (imho).

I have to poke at things a bit more, as I was quite surprised to find a tagcloud after I had imported my bookmarks. Where’d all those tags come from? And perhaps even odder… why are so many of my bookmarks tagged as “simpy bookmark”?!? I can only guess that I, at some point, imported a simpy backup into firefox?!? Wait, no, the Firefox .html exported bookmark file doesn’t have tags in it. How positively weird. Something to research later, I suppose. But really, it is obvious that I need to go in and edit the 100 imported bookmarks and give them all tags. I wonder how the importer decided what tags to assign?

It would appear that one of the differentiators here (is that really a word) is that ma.gnolia is pushing the social aspects a bit harder than normal. Lots of stuff for groups, contacts, other people, etc. And I haven’t even begun to understand how that all works yet. But, at the end of the day, that may be what sets these guys apart — the groups and related features.

I’ll continue to explore, but for now I think I plan to stick with my current social bookmarking solution.

3 Responses to “Ma.Gnolia.com - the latest Social Bookmarking site”

1. Rich G. on February 16th, 2006 10:03 pm
   

   legal@www.solo yada yada yada .com?

   Woof - you’ve grown recently! Kudos on the growth.

2. chris on February 16th, 2006 10:08 pm
   

   Oh, that gunk only shows up in the RSS feeds. I found a post of mine elsewhere, so figured I’d do that for a week or two…

3. Dave Fayram on February 19th, 2006 11:33 am
   

   Hi. I’m the developer for ma.gnolia.com, and I thought I might shed some light on a question you asked. You said, “I have to poke at things a bit more, as I was quite surprised to find a tagcloud after I had imported my bookmarks. Where’d all those tags come from?”

   When you import browser bookmarks, we use the folder names as tags in the absence of tags. We try not to destroy your existing organization, and often folder names map quite well as tags (although the reverse is seldom true).

   Hope that helps, and thanks for the review!

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