paragiraffe

I’ve spent a bit of time recently looking at the differences between del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia, with del.icio.us being arguably the most popular social bookmarks manager, and Ma.gnolia being the new kid on the block. Let’s take a look.

1. Presentation I’ll refer you to the links above, but there’s really no question Ma.gnolia wins the pretty award here. I know looks are superficial, but if something is visually appealing you to and this results in you using it more, that matters. Ma.gnolia does have ads where del.icio.us does not, but ads are so ubiquitous now, it hardly registers. (Del.icio.us was bought out by Yahoo!, which helps out here.) However, I must say I do enjoy the bare utilitarianism of the del.icio.us design/layout.

2. Bookmarking and tagging Both services utilize a fullscreen window to post links (something that’s important to me), then return you to the page you bookmarked. One of the little extra things Ma.gnolia does that I love is if there’s a meta description on the page, it will auto-insert it in the description field. Another way Ma.gnolia sets itself apart is it saves a snapshot of any page you post, the idea being that even if the site goes offline, you can still go back and look at it. I can see the rare occasion where this might be helpful, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the disk space. When you post a new link to del.icio.us, it suggests tags for you as well as displaying all of your tags, all of which are clickable. When you post a new link to Ma.gnolia, it attempts to auto-complete the tags you type in, a process that is a bit slow on my (admittedly older) Powerbook running Firefox 1.5 (it also displays your past tags for clicking). Ma.gnolia comma-separates its tags and del.icio.us does not, but there are pros and cons either way there. This one’s going to del.icio.us for tag suggestions.

3. Doing more We’ll begin my mentioning that Ma.gnolia doesn’t have an API, though there are plans for one. Del.icio.us has an API in place with which you can get/add posts, etc. Both offer RSS feeds of your posts, with Ma.gnolia offering two flavors: lite, with just your links, or full, which includes thumbnail screenshots as available (a nice extra). (Del.icio.us offers RSS feeds by tag as well, and I’m sure Ma.gnolia does, but I can’t verify that right now because the site keeps not working for me, making this post very hard to write. Will update.)

Here’s my beef with Ma.gnolia. When you click on a bookmarked link, the link you are actually clicking on is something like this: http://ma.gnolia.com/bookmarks/[random letters]/dispatch. That URL without the “dispatch” part is the link’s page on Ma.gnolia, but the link above will redirect you to the actual link. This has presumably been done to track clicks, and, to their credit, is pretty unobtrusive. However, when you pull your RSS feed and display it somewhere else, like, say, the sidebar of your site, it still gives you these dispatch links, which work, but someone might be a little wary of clicking on them, since they won’t know where they will go. This was a dealbreaker for me and is why I’ve switched back to del.icio.us. Hopefully you’ll be able to get the real link through the API when that launches.

4. Everything else Ma.gnolia is a much more social bookmarking system, with user profiles and groups and avatars and whatnot. I guess you’ll have to decide whether you need/enjoy these things or not. I’m pretty attached to the del.icio.us popular page, but Ma.gnolia only shows your two popular links on the main page. Ma.gnolia does show you recent links from your contacts, but you can do this with del.icio.us by utilizing the mysterious inbox function. Ultimately, it’s all a matter of personal preference: I see more web and computer-savvy users preferring del.icio.us, and people who are more into the social aspect of things (and like something pretty to look at) preferring Ma.gnolia. For me, it’s the former.

I want to mention that I was contacted by a product manager at Ma.gnolia after my last post on the subject, and I think it’s great how concerned they are with serving their users. I should also say that much of the functionality of Ma.gnolia was not working for me throughout writing this post, which is disappointing, although del.icio.us has had its share of downtime, too.

Final answer? Del.icio.us, but Ma.gnolia has plenty of good points.

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