Leaving the flower for the Delicious
Posted on October 6, 2008, under General, Web Dev/Tech.
I’ve decided it’s time to leave Magnolia for my bookmarking goodness and move to Delicious.
Originally, Magnolia had the interest and investment (skills if not money) of some people at the core of the web development community. They were focused on building out a bookmarking site that focused on a pleasant, well thought-out user interface. Things started good, but it appears they got distracted over time. Things I’ve noticed over the years:
- It started for me when search wasn’t fully working, and you could only search on tags, not titles and descriptions. This took a long time for them to figure out.
- They have also struggled with tag management, especially when it comes to groups.
- There is no way to do mass tag management in a group.
- It is impossible to match a group’s taxonomy without opening multiple windows to view the group’s tags.
- They have also seen their share of server downtime, which is a bit unfortunate when you are hunting for a work-related resource.
- Now they seem to be focused more on login API’s and an activity stream - which still hasn’t populated for me, my home page has been blank since they launched it - rather than finishing up what I would call phase 1.5 or phase 2 tagging functionality and group management.
I’m sure there are a lot of behind-the-scenes reasons for the above, but my perspective is from an end-user (client). I kept waiting for them to polish up what was missing, but they kept adding stuff that didn’t really matter for the purpose at hand. I think they started developing more for themselves, and began to forget the point of Magnolia.
I liked the concept they were building, with a nicer (ie, more pleasant to the eyes, and easier to user) interface. I really like some of the minor social aspects, like being able to thank users for bookmarks. I also like the concept of groups, although they need a bit more work to see the full value in both user and tag management.
However, the most recent network/server outtage gave me enough time to check out Delicious, and I found my new home. Working through tagging my imported bookmarks has been a pleasure. Very easy and quick. I do miss screenshots of the web sites, but it’s not a huge loss, and would definitely trade for easier tag management. I like the Firefox extension, although in full mode it needs a little work to be able to move icons to different areas of the status bar. Tag bundles are awesome, and I’m just starting to think through how I want to use that. Near-inline editing of an existing bookmark is fantastic. Overall it’s been a great experience so far. I’m also experimenting with the feature to post bookmarked links to my blog. We’ll see how that goes, but I think I like it so far.
And besides, all the cool kids have been here for awhile.