whichwayup.org

01/18/07 03:23 PM: Why I Switched to Ma.gnolia

I’m fairly new to the whole social bookmarking phenomenon. This past summer, I signed up for del.icio.us and started using it with some frequency. I was never a person who kept their browser bookmarks very organized, and the tagging features of del.icio.us seemed pretty nifty.

If you’re not familiar, social bookmarking sites allow you to save your bookmarks online, and “tag” them for easy sorting and categorization. Then you can see what other people have bookmarked, what the popular tags are, and so on and so forth.

del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo!, but as with Flickr, Yahoo! had the good sense not to alter the service once it was acquired. I’m not a huge fan of the del.icio.us layout, and it seemed some functionality was lacking. I wanted to integrate my bookmarks (given a certain tag) into my Textpattern blog, for example.

Now, I know, I’m sure all of this could have been done with enough hacking around with plugins. In fact, anything that works for Ma.gnolia should work for del.icio.us since they share the same API. Well, let me get to the point.

I discovered Ma.gnolia while browsing alternatives to del.icio.us. I immediately preferred the design, it struck me as cleaner and easier to use. del.icio.us always seemed a bit cluttered. I also found a plugin which made it easy for me to import certain entries to the linkroll on the blog. That was what won me over, but I began to enjoy everything else about the site.

It just seems more thought-out, more elegant. I haven’t delved into the contacts/groups aspects of the site yet, but that seems very fleshed out and substantial. If you’re on Ma.gnolia, let me know!

To be sure, there’s nothing specifically wrong about del.icio.us, it’s just Ma.gnolia beat it out. The Ma.gnolia Dashboard widget for OS X is also pretty nifty, and would alleviate the need for a bookmarklet.

I suggest you check out Ma.gnolia for yourself and see if it fits your needs for bookmarking.