Ma.gnolia 2: Popular Bookmarking Site Opens Up Its Source Code
Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service similar to Delicious, recently announced it will release its code as an open source project. Under the new plan, dubbed Ma.gnolia 2.0 or just M2, interested developers will be able to download the source code and incorporate it into their own sites.
The move is similar to what Reddit announced earlier this year with its “build your own Reddit” customization features and open source code base.
However, the Ma.gnolia announcement isn’t just about open-sourcing the code. According to a post on the company’s blog, Ma.gnolia also plans to rewrite much of its own site architecture.
M2 is a ground-up rewrite of Ma.gnolia, re-creating features we love today, taking a second run at what didn’t worked as well as planned, on a distributed, service-based architecture designed to handle the large volumes of data we’ve seen.
While Ma.gnolia is nowhere near as popular as Delicious.com, the site is notable for embracing open web technologies like OAuth, OpenID, APML and more. Ma.gnolia also offers some very nice features — like screenshots of bookmarked sites and cached copies of pages — that Delicious doesn’t.
Among the features planned for M2 are a new “stream” view, which will show you the latest bookmarks from your friends, support for both OAuth and OpenID, as well as some visual changes, like the ability customize the sidebar or theme the site.
Particularly noteworthy is the continued OAuth and OpenID support which means that, using the M2 source code, you should be able to build and host your own bookmarking site, but still use the OpenID login tools.
The code isn’t actually available just yet, but Ma.gnolia plans to release it to developers in September, and offer a public beta version of the new site by December.
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