Ma.gnolia Chooses the Open-Source Route: Will It Help Win Over Delicious?

Today at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle creators of one of the most popular social bookmarking services Ma.gnolia (but definitely far behind Delicious) have announced that they have decided to make the code behind the service open-source and rely on the developers community for further updates and growth of Ma.gnolia.

What’s more, being open-sources for Ma.gnolia means that any webmaster or any company will be able to take the code, customize it and install it as a part of other existing web properties. The interesting approach is that even if you install your version of M.gnolia on your website it will still be able to communicate with the other Ma.gnolia’s and all the links saved will join the bookmarks of the core Ma.gnolia.

The code will be available for developers to play with in September on a new Ma.gnolia.org website with the user-friendly version to implement as hosted versions of Ma.gnolia to arrive some time in December or early next year.

It is quite understandable that this is a move targeted at Yahoo’s Delicious. It is well-known that Delicious pioneered social bookmarking and taught everyone use tags for bookmarks. But Delicious is very old-fashioned and hardly ever changes - even with the latest release the changes are hardly noticeable. This makes some of the most demanding users migrate to Ma.gnolia that obviously offers more advanced functionality and supports the latest standards for data portability which is very appealing to the most tech-savvy web users. But unfortunately for Ma.gnolia this can hardly be a reason enough to migrate for the majority of less tech-savvy users because people often prefer to stick to the places they are accustomed to and Delicious is obviously one of such places - people are completely comfortable with the functionality it provides and do not really want all the latest and greatest improvements.

So the problem remains: no matter how Open ID and APML standards are important to a small web 2.0 crowd, they are of much less value to the majority of web population. Chances are this majority hardly even knows where to get an Open ID (which is now a must to register a new account on Ma.gnolia) or what value attention profiling can bring to their everyday lives. What an average user actually wants is a place to store some interesting bookmarks, tagged according to their preferences - and Delicious is still a preferred place to do just that.

But the most important advantage of Delicious is that everyone is already there. So when you see a bookmark on the homepage of the service it means that the page is actually popular among quite a number of web users. And when you save a bookmark it is invariably nice to see that your favorite page is also liked by some other people - and maybe even take a look at who these people are. So the main power of Delicious is its user base and it is also exactly what any competing service lacks. This is the same for Twitter, for example: we keep complaining at how unstable it is and how basic the functionality we get there is but we still stick to Twitter instead of migrating to a more viable alternative.

But with the federation of hosted Ma.gnolia versions on various niche topics or related to a certain company or charity the goal is obviously to build a broader network without actually making all the users to join one site. so if you already use some website for your dose of news on some certain topic you are interested in, you will probably be willing to use a social bookmarking service available at the site for additional information about the topic or to add some interesting findings of your own to the data base. So presumably in the federation of Ma.gmolia-enabled websites the number of bookmarked pages will grow incredibly and it will at least bring Ma.gnolia to the state where it can be used to actually discover some important information by consulting other people’s appreciation of the information available on this or that webpage. If this proves to be true, Ma.gnolia will finally achieve the network effect required for any social service to be valuable and will have the ability to compete with Delicious finally. What’s more, it will demonstrate that an unusual approach can prove to be a success and the open standards can play their role if used in a clever way. So I do hope to see a success here.