Make sense of your favourite links
I have a confession to make: I am a pack rat by nature. (My family will not be surprised by this. Maybe it was those tender years of growing up on a sailboat, where you can’t keep much of anything.) When it comes to “Bookmarks” or “Favourites” — those web links you save in your browser as you surf — this tendency means a lot of folders full of saved links. Many folders means lots of places to lose all those great links.
Enter the Web to the rescue! There are two great services that let you save and organize all your links online: Ma.gnolia and Del.icio.us. When you find a site you like, you can save the link to either funnily-named service and label it with any “tags” that make sense to you. Both services have these main features:
- search your bookmarks quickly (goodbye, folders!)
- send a link to others so you can share your links with them. (e.g. my links tagged “inspiration”)
- access your links from any computer with an internet connection
- you can install a tool to your browser toolbar that lets you save links quickly as you surf
I’ve tried both services and settled on Ma.gnolia for myself.
Some tidbits about Del.icio.us:
- Given how often I see links to “Add to Del.icio.us”, it appears to have a larger following than Ma.gnolia. I think Del.icio.us was first to market so that may be why.
- When you view your bookmarks in Del.icio.us, it shows you how many others have bookmarked this page. This can be great for gaging how useful a link might be. (I wish Ma.gnolia had this…)
- I find the design a bit lacking; it’s not very nice to look at and it’s difficult to find how to add a bookmark from within your Del.icio.us page
And some about Ma.gnolia:
- it’s much prettier and easier to use - looks like designers had more of a role to play in building this site
- seems to have more focus on the social networking aspect (though I notice the Del.icio.us homepage has had a bit of a redesign, maybe the social networking is more obvious there now…) The homepage has a “Featured Linker” and a list of “Hot Groups”. For instance you can join the MadeInVancouver group if you’re a Vancouver user interested in buying locally made products.
- If themed groups aren’t your thing, you can add your friends to your network and see what’s new in their bookmarks from time to time, or even subscribe to them via RSS.
Finally, if you’re concerned about privacy, any of the links that you save on either service can be marked as private. So when you send out a link to your favourite bands, nobody needs to know your secret fetish for ’80s Hair bands.
If you try these out, why not let us know what you think or share any good tips you learned along the way?
Thanks for the writeup on Ma.gnolia, Tzaddi. You’ve put your finger on many of the things we’re focussing on most here, namely ease of use and a friendly, social feel. After all, what good is it to follow someone’s links if you can’t get a sense for who the person is behind them?
You mentioned that Ma.gnolia doesn’t make it immediately clear how many others have bookmarked the same website. That’s true - we don’t put that in the summary bookmark description, but we do show it in the details of a bookmark. Our main reason for doing so is that we tend to avoid the popularity angle on things and focus more on what individuals have to say about a site they save.
There is a quick way to check a site in Ma.gnolia without even saving it, and that’s Roots. This tool sits in your browser like a regular bookmarklet and will pull what Ma.gnolia knows about a site while you’re looking at it. You can go to ma.gnolia.com/roots if you want to see more or to try it out. This gives you that community insight along the lines of the numbers of people involved and average ratings, but also shows individual thoughts from members without even leaving the page you’re looking at. I hope that helps, and thanks again.
Thanks for including Ma.gnolia in your writeup, Tzaddi. You’ve touched on the aspects that we value most, such as ease of use, friendly design and a focus on the social side of things.
You’re right that we don’t emphasize the number of other people who have also bookmarked the same site. We show that in the details of a given bookmark, but we don’t think a simple count does the idea justice. That’s why we made Roots, which is a tool specifically for tapping into what the crowd thinks of a given web page.
Roots is a bookmarklet, like the kind you would use to save a site. Just click it when looking at a website, and if it’s been saved by someone in Ma.gnolia you’ll see how many people have done so, and you can see their descriptions and ratings of the page along with top tags given by everyone. If you want to check it out, it’s at http://ma.gnolia.com/roots.
Cheers, and thanks again for the writeup.
You’re welcome, Todd. Roots sounds like a great tool and I’ll check it out.