Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Ma.gnolia is the bees knees
Before I begin yes I use del.icio.us. Finding out about del.icio.us was a lightbulb moment for me. "Now I can access my bookmarks anywhere! To hell with sending myself e-mails with links to visit!". Now that del.icio.us has been out for what seems like years in web 2.0 time and has gone corporate (i.e. bought out by Yahoo), the time seems ripe for some innovation in the whole online bookmarking space. Gnolia steps up to the plate and almost knocks one out of the park with their entry into the online bookmarking space Ma.gnolia.
Let's first look at what I considered good. The site just feels fresh. It has a certain visual pop to it that's refreshing coming from the dull grey void that was del.icio.us. Ma.gnolia just feels fresher as a result. What's also cool is the tag groups you can setup. You can create a public or moderated group where others can add bookmarks to your group, like a flickr album of sorts. You also get the must-have tagging functionality and a spot to view your or your group's most popular tags as well as a view of the tagging going on in the community as a whole. There's also a basic contact organizer included as well. You can add contacts, send and recieve messages. It's not extremely robust but you almost get the feeling like it's something that may be improved upon down the road. Nonetheless it's still good.
Now that we have the good out of the way, I'll get into my gripes. They aren't many since as a whole, my Ma.gnolia experience went fairly well. The only thing keeping me from switching whole-heartedly to Ma.gnolia is the fact that I can't work as fast in Ma.gnolia as I can in del.icio.us. That may just be me having used del.icio.us for so long but i think it may also be attibuted to the interface itself. Ma.gnolia is more laid out versus the compactness of del.icio.us. I just got used tonot having to look too far or move too far to delete, edit or add a new bookmark. It also crashed IE for me when I tried to delete a bookmark. I pulled up my gibberish bookmark, clicked the delete icon, the browser window turned dark and after a few seconds it was "not responding". I don't think it was anything wrong with the site but it still didn't give me warm fuzzies.
UPDATE:
Forgot to add that adding new bookmarks to your groups is a bit clunky. You have to create and save the bookmark first and then add it to a group. Shouldn't you be able to create the bookmark and save it to a group in one fell swoop? eh, maybe I'm crazy but that would be a touch quicker.
Will I be using Ma.gnolia? Yes, for two reasons: 1. It makes me happy and 2. It's built with Ruby on Rails (or so I've heard). So in short, Ma.gnolia is a nice, bright, new online bookmarking service that builds upon the foundation laid by those before it (namely just del.icio.us). Worth your time? Yes.
[link] Ma.gnolia ¶ 5:34 AM
Before I begin yes I use del.icio.us. Finding out about del.icio.us was a lightbulb moment for me. "Now I can access my bookmarks anywhere! To hell with sending myself e-mails with links to visit!". Now that del.icio.us has been out for what seems like years in web 2.0 time and has gone corporate (i.e. bought out by Yahoo), the time seems ripe for some innovation in the whole online bookmarking space. Gnolia steps up to the plate and almost knocks one out of the park with their entry into the online bookmarking space Ma.gnolia.
Let's first look at what I considered good. The site just feels fresh. It has a certain visual pop to it that's refreshing coming from the dull grey void that was del.icio.us. Ma.gnolia just feels fresher as a result. What's also cool is the tag groups you can setup. You can create a public or moderated group where others can add bookmarks to your group, like a flickr album of sorts. You also get the must-have tagging functionality and a spot to view your or your group's most popular tags as well as a view of the tagging going on in the community as a whole. There's also a basic contact organizer included as well. You can add contacts, send and recieve messages. It's not extremely robust but you almost get the feeling like it's something that may be improved upon down the road. Nonetheless it's still good.
Now that we have the good out of the way, I'll get into my gripes. They aren't many since as a whole, my Ma.gnolia experience went fairly well. The only thing keeping me from switching whole-heartedly to Ma.gnolia is the fact that I can't work as fast in Ma.gnolia as I can in del.icio.us. That may just be me having used del.icio.us for so long but i think it may also be attibuted to the interface itself. Ma.gnolia is more laid out versus the compactness of del.icio.us. I just got used tonot having to look too far or move too far to delete, edit or add a new bookmark. It also crashed IE for me when I tried to delete a bookmark. I pulled up my gibberish bookmark, clicked the delete icon, the browser window turned dark and after a few seconds it was "not responding". I don't think it was anything wrong with the site but it still didn't give me warm fuzzies.
UPDATE:
Forgot to add that adding new bookmarks to your groups is a bit clunky. You have to create and save the bookmark first and then add it to a group. Shouldn't you be able to create the bookmark and save it to a group in one fell swoop? eh, maybe I'm crazy but that would be a touch quicker.
Will I be using Ma.gnolia? Yes, for two reasons: 1. It makes me happy and 2. It's built with Ruby on Rails (or so I've heard). So in short, Ma.gnolia is a nice, bright, new online bookmarking service that builds upon the foundation laid by those before it (namely just del.icio.us). Worth your time? Yes.
[link] Ma.gnolia ¶ 5:34 AM
