Tuesday, March 14, 2006

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but, unfortunately, quite many screenshots are incorrect or outdated.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 Sometimes the service gives us an out of date image of a web page, or an image from another part of the web site.”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.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A good summary, hopefully they will be acting on peoples' feedback soon, especially in the bookmark page space area. I also hear they are considering running a screenshot server themselves which would be great! The screenshot/picture widget in the works is going to be fun too :)