Ma.gnolia - impressions

So, I spent significant time last week sorting my bookmarks in ma.gnolia. Here are my impressions so far.

What is good:

• Overall page design. Nice colors, clean, easy to read and navigate. The ads are pretty unobtrusive.


• Ability to have private bookmarks.


• Import feature.


• Nice auto-suggestions when adding tags.


• If I got it right, the site uses some king of fuzzy search when selecting tagged items, and this is good – it helps when I have accidentally created similar tags (reference and references, for example)


• Nice bookmarklet for FireFox – and Google toolbar add-on for IE!


• Community features seem to be good – though I don’t use them as much.

Now, what I think can be improved:

• Bookmark layout. Each bookmark occupies too much space – it would be great to have (at least, as an option) more condensed mode.


• Too many page loads. To edit details of a bookmark, I need to go to the “Edit bookmark” page, then, after saving, I’m getting “Bookmark details” page – and if I was working on some tag, I have to go to “Tags” page again, and select the necessary tag. In-place editor would help a lot.


• Tag list is not present on every page. As a result, an extra page load is needed when I want to open another tag.


• Limited search options. No support for NOT, OR operators. AND operator is supported (represented by comma), but not documented (information from http://weblog.zerokspot.com/posts/605/)

And some more notes:

• Currently Ma.gnolia has no API – but, according to the site, it is in works.


• The “Page thumbnail” feature is cool, and there is an example of creative usage of this feature (http://mongoo.se/articles/2006/03/07/ma-gnolia-bookmarks-picture-linkroll), but, unfortunately, quite many screenshots are incorrect or outdated. In the FAQ, Ma.gnolia team explains: “Ma.gnolia uses a third-party service to create the small images of saved copies of web pages. Sometimes the service gives us an out of date image of a web page, or an image from another part of the web site.”

Overall, I am happy with ma.gnolia – but, probably, will check out some other services, too.

Technorati tags: ma.gnolia, Social Bookmarking, Bookmarking