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The Social Bookmarking Showdown: Ma.gnolia

By Michael Calore October 30, 2006 Categories: Platforms & APIs

Magnolialogo_1I first discovered ma.gnolia when I was trying to figure out the del.icio.us API. Since I wasn’t terribly committed to del.icio.us at that point, I decided to investigate ma.gnolia and ended up liking it better that del.icio.us. Of course that’s based on some purely subjective criteria and is in no way meant to slag del.icio.us.

Ma.gnolia works very similar to del.icio.us and offers almost all the same basic features but it adds a few more. Ma.gnolia allows you to rate your bookmarks using a 5 star rating system (very similar to NetFlix), and ma.gnolia allows you to cross post with del.icio.us so you can in effect use both at the same time.

Ma.gnolia also recently added a feature they call “roots.” Roots is a javascript bookmarklet that you can save in your browser and when you’re on a page, just click the bookmarklet and a javascript window will overlay the page and display how many ma.gnolia users have linked to that site and give their ratings and descriptions of the site.Magnoliaroots

I switched to ma.gnolia because of their backend API. I love online storage of bookmarks and I like the sharing aspect of all these services, but I also like to share bookmarks through my own site. Both del.icio.us and ma.gnolia offer programming APIs which allow you to connect and pull out bookmarks, but del.icio.us truncates the description field and ma.gnolia doesn’t.

This was the main reason I switched (though in fairness this was some time ago and it’s possible that del.icio.us no longer does that). The ma.gnolia API is both deep and rich in methods allowing you to do just about anything you want with the data retreived.
Ma.gnolia also has an API that mirrors the del.icio.us API so that tools built for del.icio.us can also work with ma.gnolia.

Ma.gnolia has a very well designed user interface and makes nice use of AJAX without being bogged down in useless tricks.

The Low Down

Pros

  • Feature rich and actively developed
  • Screen captures and page cache
  • Excellent backend API

Cons

  • No folders for organization
  • The interface design is nice, but some may find it slower than del.icio.us

Previously reviewed:

del.icio.us

Tags: communities
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