Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

mysapce — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:39:00 -0000

i liked technorati, but now im a magnolia fan

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Guest — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 08:25:52 -0000

I had a quick look at YuppMarks.com site, but immediately disliked it for its aggressive and flickering advertising banners that are conducive to headaches. Sorry.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

speedy — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 05:17:16 -0000

Don't really know how effective and potential using delicious. I not familiar with it, just look for some information that can help me to go for it.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Nic Avery — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 06:39:47 -0000

I think there is still always going to room for bookmarking online. After two computer crashes in six months, from which I wasn't able to recover my favourites, I still use delicious to keep my favourites backed up.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Michael Haschke — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:47:30 -0000

Maybe social bookmarking is dying as a tool to promote stuff but it will stay alive as PKM/PIM tool. If bookmarks are made public for other people and indexing services, they are going social. In future maybe without too much noize (all those pitched promotional stuff).

I think it is the right step if service providers make their apps public, releasing it as open source software. So users can install it in their own user space, customizing it for their own needs (if they don't have the know how they can at least ask/pay other people to do it) and keeping their own data (also after a public service went down).

Next step is to use RDF/OWL models to make the data indepentent from the apps. I hope.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Todd Sieling — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:59:36 -0000

@Hubdub
Thanks very much! We're hearing some really supportive stuff back from both current members and new people, so it's very encouraging.

I hear you on google's shifting results based on where you're looking from. I sometimes sign out and re-run searches just to make sure something good isn't slipping from my view.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

jon — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:42:29 -0000

Muhammad,
Great food for thoughts. I happen to disagree on various levels with you. My reply got way to long so I posted on my blog:
http://gheller.wordpress.co...

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Hubdub — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:26:31 -0000

@Todd

BTW Kudos for going open source.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Hubdub — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:25:26 -0000

@Todd

Cool - I hadn't known the film reference.

I am Googling from the UK. As a nation of keen gardeners I get a page on Magnolia of the herbaceous kind (Google even gives a sub-SERP on Magnolia tree, never seen that before). I really wish Google wouldn't geo-optimize...

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Todd Sieling — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:41:25 -0000

I'm Ma.gnolia's product and community manager, so I wanted to say thanks for writing about our decision to go open source.

Quite expectedly, we have different takes on the analysis, so I'll share mine. Firstly, about goals. Making Ma.gnolia a high-traffic destination site is less important to us than making stuff that delivers what we like: shareability, a word I just made up, usability and aesthetics. Getting a chance to do over from scratch and to share it for mods is great if you love building things. People who dig that are the ones we're building for. If it really were just about traffic numbers, we wouldn't be going down a path leading to distributed, optionally federated communities; we'd be looking for more ways to bring people into a single monolithic destination.

Secondly, it's only right to say that social bookmarking is dying if you define it as a thing that stands on its own in people's online lives. To say that sharing links is dying discounts a major self-publishing channel. People push links around all the time, just through different channels, and those channels often form part of an online identity: pushing links through blogs, twitter/identi.ca, and into documents as citations and adjunct resources is all link sharing, and are applications of social bookmarking apps. I still see these things happening quite a lot, but they're becoming more a natural part of using the web, quite the opposite from a dying idea.

Lastly, social news and social bookmarking are pretty different things. Conflating 'news worth sharing' with 'resource worth saving and sharing' have pretty different domains, and I'm not sure how well equivocation works there.

@Hubdub: I just did and it came up #4, after 3 links about the movie that inspired the name.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Hubdub — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:38:12 -0000

Magnolia always was up against it as a number 2 behind Delicious (and they amazingly managed to find an even more unusable URL. Ever googled for Magnolia?)

I'm not convinced social bookmarking is dying though. Feels to me there is just shinier toys out there now (Twitter, FriendFeed etc) which the early adopters are going for. Social bookmarking still solves a significant problem (and if they added a decent search to Delicious...)

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Loli — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:51:25 -0000

@Jon...Amen Brother!!

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Maldoror — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:11:37 -0000

Strange article. Bookmarking is dying? In my eyes social bookmarking and social news are two complete different things. At least I use them for different purposes:
1. Social news for random news and entertainment, mostly superficial stuff. I digg good news and stories which I read once and probably never again.
2. Podcasts or blogs via RSS Reader for specific information of my interest. Good news are shared and/or starred (if I want to read them again), but I don't bookmark them.
3. In contrast, social bookmarking to find and share the best sites on the net. I use it for long term in depth information and knowledge. I bookmark sites I'm going to visit again - not just briefly news.

You see the difference? If one is just into news, like you, there might be better tools and you probably don't need social bookmarking (even though delicious is far less noisy). For everyone else, who wants to _bookmark_ and share good sites (and not news), social bookmarking is one of the best tools you get. Think about it.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

kawika — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:31:48 -0000

I see a lot of bloggers and reporters sharing bookmarks through Twitter, but it doesn't organize anything like Delicious.

Unfortunately, Delicious doesn't store pages for searching, offer commenting by others, or provide offline reading. FriendFeed is trying to foster conversations around shared items, but audience size pales in comparison to Digg, Yahoo or Facebook.

The social aspects of sharing articles and sites seem like a perfect fit for media outlets to take up. Desperate to gather audiences around their content, the largest publishers might do well to come together and popularize an open service that helps any site feed readers back to them for discussion, research and storage.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

rprather — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:27:12 -0000

Delicious is still the best. And really I don't care if it's social. I just want my bookmarks anywhere I go (that has internet access).

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

~C4Chaos — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:13:04 -0000

i still love ma.gnolia. but i agree with your general assessment.

in addition, the competitive landscape of "lifestreaming" services (e.g. friendfeed) would make bookmarking sites more obsolete in the near future. e.g. you can do bookmarking on FF and Strands. and the search feature makes up for the tagging.

that said, user-loyalty would still be a big factor in keeping bookmarking sites like delicious and ma.gnolia alive. the real test would be in the monetization. if it can't be monitized (or acquired) then even a loyal user base won't be able to save it.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Guest — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:55:18 -0000

Delicious is still the very first Firefox "add-on" I install on any new machine. Sharing news, sites and links is good, but keeping my links organized the way I want, with the tags which make sense for me, remains even more important and kind of a "basic" need in my view.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

hacksome — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:53:48 -0000

BookMarking is just as fundamental as Browsing - for the time being. Instapaper etc.. are good, but they are not going to take away anything from Bookmarking.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

Muhammad Saleem — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:34:04 -0000

Jon and Chris, thanks for commenting.

Bookmarking sites are still fairly popular and I'm sure some people will always use them, but if you follow the buzz and look at the traffic or engagement metrics (or even general trends) you'll see this shared sentiment decreasing in favor of social news or personal bookmarking.

Re: Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source, But Bookmarking is Dying

jon — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:20:16 -0000

del.icio.us is still my winner.
it's far less noisy than everything else. i have nothing to prove; i am not trying to make a name for myself, i want to keep track of sites i find interesting.

del.icio.us scratches that itch.