Ma.gnolia or Del.icio.us? Argh…
I’m going through a social bookmarking dilemma, trying to decide whether or not to “move my business” over to ma.gnolia from del.icio.us. My del.icio.us tags have become a gigantic mess, mostly because I used to use the Foxylicious Firefox extension, which transformed periods into subfolders in the FF Bookmarks toolbar. I don’t use that anymore (now it’s a toss between Quicksilver and Spotlight) but the remnants of “web.dev.css” remain. I’ve been trying to plan in the time to go through and redo the whole lot but geez that’s tedious.
So here’s the new kid on the block, ma.gnolia. It looks good (although I do like the sparseness of del.icio.us so that’s a draw), it seems to emphasize the social aspect a little bit more, at least that’s what they say. The downside of the way ma.gnolia is going about things is that it is trying to create a “hangout”. You can form cliques (er, groups) to share your bookmarks with and get theirs—but I just want a fast site where I can send my bookmarks and see what others have marked as well. My needs for sociability in this space are met by del.icio.us’s “and 800 other people”, so far. It has felt a little stale though, so I’m hoping ma.gnolia will show me things I didn’t know I’ve been missing.
The one killer feature that is really influencing me to switch is ma.gnolia’s “saved copies” feature—it copies a version of the site right when you bookmark it so that even if something happens to the site, you can still access what you had bookmarked later on. I’m really not sure how much information they are saving, much less how to access it (it’s only mentioned in the tutorial as far as I can tell), but it sounds great.
Of course, ma.gnolia not only wants to be your social bookmarking site, they want to be your search engine as well. With the amount of junk that shows up in a Google search these days … maybe I should start working on revising my bookmarks, now that I’ve imported them. Or will del.icio.us come up with some phenomenal to keep me from switching?
Hey thanks for the post, and for checking us out. It sounds like you’ve got a tough call between Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us, and we’ll obviously leave that up to you to decide without a sales pitch.
But I did want to speak to the thoughts about us being your search engine. It’s true, we think we’re building a good tool to aid search. But search is something that we turn to different services for different specialities. If I look for a photo, I go to Flickr and not Google Images, because the former just works better. When I need to find a document, it’s Yahoo or Google. They do that thing really well. When it’s torrents, it’s Pirate’s Bay or ISO Hunt. And so on.
So what I’m getting at is that we’re a place to start a lot of searches, like interest-based searches, but we don’t expect to be the only search engine in someone’s online life. The web’s a place where you can have some laughs and unexpected discoveries just looking at a lot of crap, but we want to be the place you go to for the best of it. What’s crap and what’s great – that’s the fun part because the members decide.
Thanks again for checking us out and for sharing some thoughts on how we’re shaping up.
Todd: Thanks for the info. For me (and I’d guess most people) though, the idea of an all-encompassing search engine that just magically delivers exactly what you are looking for no matter the type of info sounds ideal, and fits the “hype” of Google.
I completely agree with you on the specialized searches though; Flickr for photos, etc. I’ve had to switch to this strategy as well because the results are so much more accurate.
Congrats on the site, hopefully you’ll get even better (such as bookmarking and adding to a group at the same time!) and the results will contain “the best of it”.
just checked out magnolia because of this post, but i must admit, i’m seeing some great functionality coming out of delicious recently, and i’m even using it for my own projects. its openness is a very powerful tool in and of itself.
I must say that as a designer, Magnolia is so nice I want to keep the tab open, while I always avoided looking at my Delicious account.
Magnolia seems to start with a nice set of features (it’s already powering my link roll), and I expect that new features and APIs will probably be coming soon if the developers are keen on taking over a portion of the social bookmarking market.
Julien: What functionality has changed over at del.icio.us recently? I noticed your audio comments through del.icio.us feature, very cool. (BTW, I subscribed to your podcast—love your tag line)
Paul D: I spent a couple of hours importing my bookmarks and making a go of it, but my biggest issue was that it’s too slow. Pretty doesn’t mean much in this space, in my opinion. (and I love a pretty site as much as the next person!) Adding a bookmark to your own list, plus to a group takes way too long and changing tags en masse would take forever. I changed up all of my tags in del.icio.us in about 20 minutes; can’t seem to find that function in Ma.gnolia. Like you said though, I’m sure we’ll be seeinga lot of new features over the next couple of months.
And it’s not even like these two are the only social bookmarking sites out there… :)
For my money, its all abou ma.gnolia & quicksilver! Both are intuitive, well-designed, and reliable. You can’t beat that.
mathew: I think both of what you listed are pretty, but intuitive isn’t the first thing that springs to mind.
Ma.gnolia’s adding to groups functionality being separate from making a new bookmark is infuriating, especially when you are convinced the option just *has* to be there and you just aren’t seeing it.
Quicksilver is an incredible app, super powerful, but has a pretty decent learning curve beyond the most basic of functions. Beautiful, yes—intuitive? Not in my opinion.
So, which one have you picked?
JBH: del.icio.us. I haven’t opened ma.gnolia in months.