Found is the new Search
Being a Steel Magnolia myself (hometown: Atlanta, Georgia), I am predisposed to like Ma.gnolia simply on the name; the new social application, however, is also a very useful way to find and keep track of new bookmarks.
As of yesterday, we Ma.gnolia beta testers are able to share details before the official launch.
Ma.gnolia belongs to the subset of social apps for organizing bookmarks, joining del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, both of which I use occasionally, and Technorati and Digg, which chronicle the state of the blogosphere. While each of these similar apps aspires to create a community of users and tagged sites, the leader of the Social App Pack will be the app with the smartest tags for itself. Ma.gnolia’s tagline, “Found is the new Search,” articulates the goal: allow users to find relevant sites through a community of taggers.
I’m rereading Benedict Anderson’s 1983 classic on nationalism, Imagined Communities, for a graduate class with Bruce Holsinger, and some of Anderson’s text is relevant to how social apps function. [Since I'm borrowing from nationalism theory here, the sites themselves will function as nations and the app creators will be sovereigns (in Ma.gnolia's case, Larry Halff).] Anderson’s most-quoted bits are fine for the distinctions I’m going to make; he posits, “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members,” “communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined,” and “the nation is always conceived as as a deep, horizontal comradeship” in his introduction. As I begin to invest time in adding value to my profile in each of these apps, I wonder about my fellow users, the interface design, and whether deep, horizontal comradery is possible here.
A response to googlesprawl, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Ma.gnolia imagine themselves as the keepers of their respective kingdoms of bookmarks/favorites. As even casual users collect dozens (and nerds hundreds) of bookmarks, organizing them becomes necessary, and one trend is an all-in-one solution like Barebones’s new Yojimbo (only for Mac OS X). The other trend is the bookmark social app, which offers instead, through the browser, a community of fellow users trolling for inspiration. And these apps may be wrapped tightly into the browser experience of the future (e.g. when you load Flock, you are prompted to sign in to your del.icio.us account, and the Flock browser calls your bookmarks “favorites”, just like the del.icio.us app). I’ve lined up my social app buttons in the toolbar; when I find a site I like, I press all three buttons within seconds and save it to my three profiles in three clicks. So far, the same.
The difference lies in the ways each app imagines (literally, as Ma.gnolia hasn’t launched yet) what the community might be—where the app’s developers have left room for growth and the language included to encourage “groups,” alliances within the community between members who may never interact. Each app has its superstars; Jeffrey Zeldman has been involved with Ma.gnolia, and so has built an impressive list of bookmarks. Predictably, everyone wants to be his friend/”contact”. (I do.) StumbleUpon’s most active members are (distressingly) lauded as “Top Stumblers,” which sounds like a dubious distinction if one is unaware of the app name. (Wouldn’t HappenUpon be a lovelier app name?) Del.icio.us’s top members are not labeled as such, although I remain hopeful that a “Most Del.icio.us” category of members will emerge. Every user can join a group, though, and Ma.gnolia’s group interface is simple and logical; this screenshot is of the Urban Vinyl group I joined yesterday (Gary Basemania runs high in town as the Toby exhibit moves from one gallery to another).
The final question is one of maintenance; how to remind users to return to the community. For this, Ma.gnolia has RSS and Atom feeds for each group, a nice feature I’m already hooked on from the WordPress forums.
The magnolia as a flower is linked to dignity, nobility, and hospitality; if this app preserves the simplicity of the interface, keeps integrating profiles and avatars into the app at all levels, and welcomes users best, the metaphor will be implemented and the community bloom.
………………………………………….
Related posts:
Posted by Kristen Taylor on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006, 12:36 am * Filed in Design. * . Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
February 2nd, 2006 at 5:39 am
Since you are checking out new social bookmarking sites, I thought you might also like to take a look at http://www.blinklist.com. If you do, I would love to hear your thoughts. Mike
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:09 am
Blinklist wasn’t even on my radar, but the comment above is from someone on their team (Blinklist is by Mind Valley). On Blinklist, members are “contributors,” and popular topics are ranked by “blinks,” (like “winks” in online dating sites and recalling the old “how many eyeballs?” assessment ). Last April Zeldman compared tag clouds to mullets (clouds
do not appear in Ma.gnolia profilesappear in a list form, more part of the profile than what defines the user), but Blinklist does a nice job of incorporating a personal colored cloud (weighty tags are an orange and blue gradient, like the app logo) into user profiles. Blinklist calls it a thought cloud (thought=tag). The interface is a little busy, but built with the right stuff. As Yahoo! buys up the big social bookmarking apps, we’ll see what happens with this and Ma.gnolia.February 2nd, 2006 at 9:37 am
Thanks for the review Kristen. I was surprised and happy to see Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ noted here – it’s one of my favorite texts from a couse on literature and nationalism back in university. I think I’ll have to pull it off the shelf for inspriration and reflection as we build the Ma.gnolia community. Although each social bookmarking service now seems like its own kingdom, we’d like to grow Ma.gnolia in a way that spans those boundaries, as there is much more to be had in this kind of venture through cooperation instead of mere competition. We’re all doing the same thing, just with different views for different people. Hopefully we’ll be able to make a community that joins freely with other communities. Keep watching – there’s much more to come in Ma.gnolia.
February 3rd, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Darren Barefoot has posted a Q & A with Jeffrey Zeldman (Happy Cog crafted the Ma.gnolia brand and design) and Todd Sieling (Project Manager at Ma.gnolia) that expands on Todd’s comment above. As I’ve told friends this week, Ma.gnolia wants to be a social bookmarking tool for all of us.
I noted in my response to Mike Reining’s comment above that the Blinklist interface was a little busy for my liking, and he emailed asking what specifically I didn’t like. It’s nice to be asked (I’m flattered to have Todd Sieling commenting here too); in response, I think one of the most appealing aspects of Ma.gnolia is the simplicity of the interface (no icons, no diagonal lines in the search box, etc.). Look at the screenshots. My page on Blinklist shows my imported bookmarks (at the moment I have 705) and my tag cloud.
(yawn.)
February 4th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Thought you might also be interested in checking out http://www.diigo.com. It’s about “Social Annotation”, a superset of social bookmarking.
Basically Diigo allows you to add highlights and sticky notes, in situ, on any web page you read. Think of a giant transparency overlaying on top of all the web pages. You can write on the transparency as you wish, as private notes or public comments. And you can read public comments on the transparency left by other readers of the same page, and hear their “two cents” and interact with them. So in addition to being a great personal tool, it has a significant social component. Thus, the service is referred to as Social Annotation.
Several powerful features are combined in Diigo toolbar to make it a real “power extension”:
* A great web annotation tool – adding highlights and sticky notes on any web page, anywhere.
* A fully-customizable search tool – like google’s toolbar, but fully customizable, so you can add any other specialty searches.
* Content selection menu makes it extremely convenient to interact with every word on a web page – highlight, search, look up – whatever you want!
* Tagging your bookmarks, comments and clippings, and share them as your bookmark lists or publish as blogs
* Full-text search of your bookmarks!
* Plus, much more forthcoming…
Diigo is still under closed beta. I would like to invite you to try it out. We’d love to have your participation and feedback. Thanks.
Maggie
February 7th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
hey Kristen,
thanks for adding me as a contact on Ma.gnolia – I feel a lot less lonely there now!
Do you get the feeling that something that Ma.gnolia is missing is the conversation that goes on in, say, Flickr? I know there’s a menu item called ‘messages’ but I haven’t been able to figure out how to message anyone yet. And I think i would be great to be able to have a bit of a discussion around the relative merits of different links etc.
What do you think?
February 11th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
[...] I hasten to add this is by no means a dismissal of Ma.gnolia. I’m still learning. They are still in beta, and they seem to lack the critical mass of users which other social bookmarking sites already have. It’s also true that in many ways, these sites are philosophically different; Ma.gnolia solves the “Google noise problem” with editorial management, where del.icio.us solves it, as Clay Shirky observed, by aggregation. That’s why I don’t think del.icio.us will ever have top members, as Kristen suggested; for them, the crowd is more important. [...]
February 12th, 2006 at 12:46 am
Leisa we totally agree with you, and our intention is to grow messaging in the system in ways that our members ask for. The biggest response we’ve had so far is that there should be ways of having discussions in groups, and we will be working at that item soon after we launch. Beyond that, we have some other ideas and good suggestions about what else we can do with messages. What would you like to see?