Social bookmarking: the awkward genius hopes you'll take its ideas to parties for it.
Ma.gnolia, one of the most popular second tier social bookmarking services on the web, announced today at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle that the company has thrown itself to the mercy of the development community and is going to make its code available in open source.
Ma.gnolia is tiny compared to Yahoo's Delicious, but in every way other than network effects, it's more interesting. Unfortunately, that's all pretty academic. When interesting competes with the powerful network effects that come from the huge number of Delicious users - Delicious wins. Today's announcement may help grow Ma.gnolia quickly; at the very least it's a daring move.
There aren't a whole lot of people using Ma.gnolia, but a lot of them are people who place great emphasis on web standards, data portability and other forward looking ideas.
The coolest features of Ma.gnolia?
The value proposition is really not clear here but I think this is it. You get a local social bookmarking system with your additional features and your branding, but with the network effect of access to all other Ma.gnolia users' bookmarks for research and sharing. If enough people go for it, it will be cool. That's the classic problem for social media tools and it's not going to be an easy one to over come. Open sourcing the service is a bold step that could be a big win. We do hope it will work.
Will communities all over the web download, customize and participate in a federated Ma.gnolia? Maybe. It's hard to know. Unfortunately, Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff's presentation announcing the open sourcing of Ma.gnolia here at Gnomedex illustrates the problems the company will continue to face. Just like the service Halff created, the man himself seems like a brilliant guy who you know has great ideas but communicates them poorly enough that it frustrates people pretty quickly. The value proposition is unclear, the site architecture is frustrating - right now it's a service for standards true believers. This author uses it personally, though almost every time I do I grumble and ask whether I should go back to using Delicious.
If a federated Ma.gnolia thrives and can capture the network effects so important to social bookmarking, it will be because of the value of open technology and in spite of Ma.gnolia's own struggles. Network effects are key to social bookmarking because a large number of users makes these services a place where you can discover cool things quickly, where popular items for a given tag have risen out of a large number of candidates and where the things you bookmark can be seen by a lot of people. If you want to do research, you want to do it at Delicious right now, not Ma.gnolia.
We hope that this strategy serves Ma.gnolia well. It does offer a business model in charging companies for custom implementation, but we'll see how many companies go for it. Companies may be better served by a social bookmarking service aimed at enterprise use, with solid granular privacy controls, like ConnectBeam.
Will you consider implementing a local, federated version of Ma.gnolia? The code should hit the web in December, so there's plenty of time to contact the company and make sure it gets open sourced in a way that works for developers. Let us know your thoughts in comments.
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This is really exciting news! Between Ma.gnolia, BuddyPress, and DiSo, we're starting to see some really interesting open source tools.
Posted by: Ilya Grigorik | August 22, 2008 11:00 AM
Typo: instand messenger
Posted by: Brandon Philips | August 22, 2008 11:01 AM
ma.gnolia is beautiful, but demands too much engagement. Delicious is knock and drop. I could make an analogy to romantic partners, but I shan't.
Delicious could be better: IM or email when a link in your network, integration with Outlook/office/linkedIn.
But then again a year ago we were all full of suggestions of improving Twitter. And you know what, it works (no irony) well as it is.
Posted by: derek | August 22, 2008 11:03 AM
There's definitely an enterprise play for Ma.gnolia in the Mid/SMB mkt. As far as a federated model goes, Delicious already enables that by letting you share only with specific users.
Overall though, you're absolutely right - Connectbeam is killing it with some very impressive, large customers on board already.
Posted by: Sameer | August 22, 2008 11:18 AM
I would say "So what?!". Open source is such a buzz word now, nearly everyone gets excited when they hear or read this word. But so what?
Even if everybody (with programming skills of course) can modify their code, that doesn't mean that their modificaiton will be taken into account and published.
By the way, they are not the first Digg-like website who open sourced their web applications, there is also www.DotNetKicks.com which code is also avaliable to public.
Posted by: Mike Borozdin | August 22, 2008 11:38 AM
@Mike Borozdin
( Said in my best Darth Vader voice impersonation )"I find your lack of faith distrubing..." *Makes pinching gesutre with fingers*
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"Will you consider implementing a local, federated version of Ma.gnolia?"
I will most def look at it. Depends on how they break up the pieces. We need a nice booking bit for Android, may be possible to book mark locations as I walk around. I would also like to book mark favorited Twitter statuses with less hassle.
Thank you for posting this Marshal, especially for bringing up the potential for Federated Open Source as a profitable business model.
Posted by: Todd | August 22, 2008 12:29 PM
C'mon Marshall-baby - give us a break. In your description of why it's cool it took 5 bullets before you reached one that delivers value to people.
Maybe they should have focused more on delivering value rather than implementing openness.
Posted by: Steve R | August 22, 2008 1:32 PM
Anyone know what technology it utilizes?
Posted by: jc | August 22, 2008 3:20 PM
thank you mucx
Posted by: sohbet | August 22, 2008 5:35 PM
When I tried out the service a looong time ago it was d o g s l o w. Seems peppier now anyway. What's it implemented in?
Posted by: Roebot | August 23, 2008 12:26 AM
I doubt the appeal of open standards to a larger web audience - the standards like OpenID or APML only matter to the most tech-savvy users. But if the quality of the service that can be hosted on websites is good enough and many webmasters choose to implement it on their niche sites, it may be a huge hit with rapidly increasing user base and number of bookmarks.
Posted by: Svetlana Gladkova
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August 23, 2008 12:45 AM
I love it from a business perspective, this a sheer bravary. This market is saturated and it needs someone to think outside the box and Ma.gnolia have done this and get my vote!
http://business-vs-technology.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Aziz Musa | August 23, 2008 2:29 AM
I would like to switch to magnolia, but it's delicious's firefox addon (small and functional) that makes it a permanent fixture for me. Anyone heard magnolia's thoughts/plans on making an addon clone?
Posted by: Micah Elliott | August 23, 2008 7:10 PM
I've been using it for quite some time now, but never knew the other features of it. Thanks, it's very informative post.
Posted by: ITrush | August 24, 2008 3:55 AM
@Marshal: What's their business model? I don't really get what they're doing and how they want to develop the human search business. Digg and Mahalo are on a way to make money but Del.icio.us and Ma.Gnolia don't to me. Then what's the point in switching in an OpenSource model? Enabling SMB companies to create their own bookmarking features? Why not, but shouldn't that be in a SaaS business model?
Posted by: Romain | August 25, 2008 5:43 AM
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Posted by: yakup | August 25, 2008 7:13 AM
I've been using it for quite some time now, but never knew the other features of it. Thanks, it's very informative post.
Thenks and Sohbet and Chat --- Sohbet Chat herkezi beklerim gonyalıdan sevgilerle. :p
Posted by: Thanks gonyaidan :p | August 29, 2008 12:26 PM