Ma.gnolia
February 9, 2006
I just received a beta account with a new social bookmarking site, Ma.gnolia. I’m awaiting import of my del.icio.us bookmarks, which they make dead simple for anyone to do using the del.icio.us api. Once imported, I’ll have a better feel for whether it has enough to it to make me jump ship. It’s definitely a sexier site with some nice integration of community features somewhat like the del.icio.us inbox but taken to a whole new level. There’s also a private bookmarking function and page archiving which many people often desire. But what I really think is novel is the “story” they use to explain their service - here’s a snippet:
What is Ma.gnolia? To understand Ma.gnolia completely, let us tell you a story. It’s a story we like to call “And on the First Day, There was Search.”
Really, on the first day there was the Internet. It started as just a little network for scientists, but pretty soon some other very smart people realized that this world wide web could be a way for people across the globe to communicate and share information on a massive level. Some people actually say it changed the world, and we agree.
Suddenly it became normal to find information and entertainment, and to share what you found with your friends on a whim. And even with just a small portion of the entire human race online, almost everything you looked for was, in some form, out there. That made for a lot of web pages. Too many for any mere mortal to sift through on any given day.
And so search was born, and that was the first true day of the Internet. Searching seemed obvious: you guessed the words that the object of your desire would contain, and the search engine showed you all of the best websites containing those words. And that was a good thing. When you found something excellent, you bookmarked it in your browser. Search and bookmarks ? they went great together.
Things are different now. Even the best search engines can’t be sure of what you’d like in the thousands of pages it finds on every search. And with so many pages, searching has been getting tough. Really tough. Websites can be misleading about how good they are or what its content they really hold. But you can’t blame the poor search engine for this ? it’s just a machine. If a person could look at every page on the internet and make sure it showed up only in the right searches, we’d all have to pay hundreds of dollars a month just to search. For real.
It gets worse. Because new web pages are added to the internet every day, the results you get for any given search term can change almost daily. So you can find the perfect website about your favorite band one day, but if you didn’t save it and searched for it again a week later, you may never find it again.
As if all that wasn’t enough. We’re getting online with more devices from more places than ever before, and for most people keeping bookmarks up to date and organized is a lost art. And as for sharing the cool things you find with your friends? That’s still usually a cut-and-paste job. Don’t get us wrong. We know that searching, bookmarking and sharing cool finds all work, but they don’t work together like they should and they don’t work as well as they can.
Ma.gnolia is a website and a technology that was created to help improve all of these things. [continue reading at their About page
Interesting approach, don’t you think. It reminds me of “the story of libraries” that maybe we ought to trot out more…
Anyway, I’ve already found a new useful bookmark - Openomyy. A 1 gig online storage account that uses tagging instead of folders. A quick search and I noted Zeldman was starting to say nice things about it, so I’ll have to keep watch on it.
Posted in Social Bookmarking
