Social bookmarking shootout: Diigo vs ma.gnolia
There seems to have been a bumper crop of social bookmarking services recently. There’s the grandaddy of them all, de.icio.us; a brace of followers, Spurl and Furl; and then the newbies (or abecedarians) Diigo and ma.gnolia. As far as I know, the last two offer something not provided by the others—-private bookmarks. That might seem somewhat antithetical to the social aspect of bookmarking, but if you’re putting a lot of effort into filing links using one of these services, it would be really nice to store all your bookmarks there, and so have access to your bookmarks wherever you were.
I was lucky enough to get beta accounts at both Diigo and ma.gnolia, and have had some interesting exchanges with developers of both services. So I thought that I’d write about my impressions of them. I should point out that both services are being added to all the time, and some of the things I’d like to see appear seem to be possibilities for the future, or are planned features.
Interface
Diigo and ma.gnolia go for somewhat different aesthetics. Diigo presents the bookmarks in quite a compact, stripped-down way. Generally the arrangement is very functional, with your bookmarks shown on the left with links to expand the presentation to show your comments or highlights (more about those later). You can also sort the bookmarks in different ways (including by read/unread status, which allows you to use Diigo as a holding tank for pages to read later). On the right, there’s a scrolling box containing your tags. When you view your bookmarks by tag, there’s an additional box showing your related tags, which also allows you to add or subtract tags to the filter. You can also perform batch operations on multiple bookmarks by selecting a subset with the checkboxes and using a drop down menu. The downside of that is that editing a single bookmark is a bit clunky because you have to check the box first.
ma.gnolia is rather gorgeous, as you might expect from a site designed by Jeffrey Zeldman’s happy cog design company. The flip side of that is that you don’t get to see many of your bookmarks on your home page, and even the more compact ‘view all’ doesn’t fit that many more on. That may be a plus or a minus depending on how you feel about white space.
Bookmarking
As I mentioned, both services provide the ability to mark bookmarks as private, and both store cached versions of pages so that if the content changes, you can see the version that you bookmarked. ma.gnolia also provides a 5-star rating system for each bookmark, though I haven’t quite been sure what to make of that. Should I regard it as how useful the bookmark is to me, or the quality of the page it bookmarks?
Diigo exclusively uses a toolbar (which works in Firefox, IE or Flock) for getting bookmarks into the system: there isn’t as yet even a form on the Diigo page for marking a URL as a bookmark. The toolbar is great and offers unique features like custom searches and filtered bookmark sets (for example, all your bookmarks tagged with ‘rails’), and the main button changes in appearance when you’ve already bookmarked the page you’re on, or others have left public comments on a page. This is surprisingly useful, as I’ve often ended up with duplicate bookmarks after visiting a site twice and forgetting that I’d bookmarked it the first time.
Earlier on, I mentioned comments and highlights. You can leave comments on a page which can be private (only you can see them), or public (any Diigo user can see them). You can also select a portion of text on the page, which then gets associated with your bookmark and can be viewed in your bookmark list. Finally, you can attach ‘sticky notes’ to these highlights, which appear when you roll over them with a mouse (again, these can be public or private). Diigo allows you to set whether bookmarks should be public or private by default, and allows you to post Diigo-ed bookmarks to de.icio.us and/or to your browser bookmarks simultaneously, which is a useful way to keep things in sync. Unfortunately, if you don’t use Firefox, IE or Flock, you lose most of the functionality. The toolbar is great, but I hope that they add tools for other browsers in due course.
ma.gnolia sticks to more traditional tools, and provides a Javascript bookmarklet which allows you to enter all the fields, plus a simple form entry box on your home page. There’s also a ‘Snap Mark’ bookmarklet which more or less works in the background letting you get on with what you were doing, but simply marks the URL (without any description or tags) and defaults to a public bookmark.
Searching
Oddly, both services are weakest on their searching capabilities. Diigo has a relatively powerful and flexible search, which allows you to search your own or everyone’s bookmarks, and simultaneously does a full-text search of all of the fields. However, the search page looks completely different to the bookmark page, and you have to use the back button to find your bearings again. ma.gnolia shows you search results by effectively filtering your bookmark page, but it defaults to a search of everyone’s bookmarks, and takes a couple of clicks to search your own bookmarks or tags. I’ve seen it mentioned that ma.gnolia allows you to search for conjunctions of tags (e.g. bookmarks tagged with both ‘ruby’ and ‘rails’), but for the life of me I haven’t been able to get that to work. I think that both need to work on their search interfaces, because as collections of bookmarks grow, they become very unwieldy, or even useless if you can’t quickly find what you’re looking for.
Importing/Exporting
Both services have a reasonable number of ways to get bookmarks in from de.icio.us or from a standard browser bookmark HTML file, and both provide a variety of RSS feeds to subscribe to your own or others’ bookmarks. You can export to an HTML file with ma.gnolia, and as I’ve already mentioned, Diigo can simultaneously copy to your browser’s bookmarks. ma.gnolia also provides ‘link rolls’, which are customisable chunks of Javascript which you can paste into a blog or other web page to get a nicely formatted list of your last n public bookmarks. You can see mine to the right in the sidebar.
Social aspects
Obviously, one of the main selling points of both services is the social aspect: sharing your bookmarks with others and using it as a way to discover new things. I’ve already mentioned the highlights, sticky notes and comments in Diigo, which—-if the user base increases—-could be an intriguing way for the community to collaboratively annotate the web. You can also have ‘friends’ in Diigo, to whom you can forward bookmarks that you think might interest them.
ma.gnolia has a similar concept of ‘contacts’, but there are also ‘groups’ a bit like flickr groups which you can join and post bookmarks to. I think that these groups can also be private, which might be a great way to share bookmarks with a small group of colleagues, or a team. Recent bookmarks from your contacts and groups appear at the bottom of your bookmark page.
It’s difficult to say how effective either service will be in these social aspects until the number of users increases a bit, but both have some very promising aspects.
Conclusions
So, who wins the shootout? Well, I’m not sure that there is a clear winner yet. Both have some great features not seen in the other, but neither comes out clearly on top. It’s quite difficult to use both seriously at the same time, as you end up forgetting which one you stored a bookmark in—-not to mention the fact that they use different separators for tags (ma.gnolia uses commas, Diigo uses spaces), which gets mighty confusing. At the moment I’m leaning very slightly towards ma.gnolia because it seems to be progressing faster, and I’m promiscuous with my browser use which makes using Diigo a bit tricky. But I’ll be watching them both with interest.
Updated (22/02/2006): Corrected some factual errors about Diigo.
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Is this Applespeak, it's like reading another language; full stops in wierd places, I'm just waiting for you to come up with a database called smo.gas.bord. We PC'ers speak Engish!
I went into the Brent ZCross Apple shop at the weekend, if the quality of internal construction is as good as the design and tactile aspect, Wow!
I am seriously tempted, but there are already 1 PC and 3 Laptops between 3 of us......----- Yeah, I don't understand ma.gnolia.com. It's cool if you can spell something with your whole url like del.icio.us, but using a .com just ruins it.
I'd like to grab techno.man.cy for my own domain, but unfortunately Cypress doesn't offer their CCTLD, you have to get .com.cy, etc.
by Phil @ 22/02/2006 12:03 am • Permalink •
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I also got a Beta magnolia account, signed up but never actually bookmarked anything. I havent seen a reason/feature why I should switch away from delicious.
My favorite delicious feature is being able to magically bookmark things and they appear on my blog, oh and I also like that Yahoo! own Flickr and Upcomming, I'd like to keep all my eggs in one basket.
by Tom @ 22/02/2006 1:02 am • Permalink •
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>>Jonathan Briggs wrote: >>We PCâers speak Engish!
Nice
////
Good post bsag,
I think both sites have a tough job on their hands, as the features which add value over del.icio.us depend on a gathering user-base, yet people need a compelling reason to make the switch initially. Catch 22!
by steven @ 22/02/2006 9:02 am • Permalink •
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Thanks for the nice coverage of Diigo.
Thought to clarify a few things: Diigo currently already offers toolbars for Firefox, IE, and Flock browsers. Our system will automatically detects which browser you're using and offering the choices to the user.
We will also offer ways to bookmark without going through our toolbar very shortly so it will be browser / operating system independent. Plus lots more cool features forthcoming...
While we're working on further improving the interface of our search, Diigo already offers full-text search on everything (ie. title, tags, highlights, sticky note comments, entire pages, user, etc.) plus a rich advanced search syntax support. On top of that, we also offer a fully customizable search tool that allows user to access any speciality search quickly.
By combining social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, into one powerful tool, Diigo strives to provide the best tool for knowledge users, and in the process, turn the entire web into a writable, participatory, and interactive media.
by Maggie @ 22/02/2006 4:02 pm • Permalink •
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Jonathan Briggs: Yes, the weird placement of full stops in domain names is slightly annoying (I always have to stop and think where the full stops go in del.icio.us). However, even though I know how you love to tease us Mac users, but it's a web thing (specifically a 'Web 2.0' thing), rather than an Apple thing. So there.
Phil: Shame! That would be quite a cool one.
Tom: As I mentioned, ma.gnolia does have a link roll, so you can do just that: bookmark things and they appear on your blog magically. You can even make a custom blogroll so that only bookmarks with specific tags make it to your roll.
steven: Yes, it is a Catch 22 situation, so a lot depends on how many people pick up on it and like what they find. Obviously, both ma.gnolia and Diigo are paddling upstream there because del.icio.us already has so many users.
Maggie: You're welcome, it's a nice service. Yes, I forgot about the other browsers you support, but as a Mac user, IE is out and Flock is just Firefox with add-ons. Anyway, good to hear that more is coming. As I mentioned, Diigo's search is much more flexible than ma.gnolia's. Keep up the good work!
by bsag @ 22/02/2006 5:02 pm • Permalink •
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Have you checked out OnlyWire? Allows you to submit bookmarks to up to 15 services simultaneously, including del.icio.us and ma.gnolia (but not Diigo).
by Rob Bevan @ 25/02/2006 7:02 pm • Permalink •
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Hi Miss bsag,
I wrote about a dozen online bookmark managers and just saw your post today. I didn't write about these two cause I didn't have invites, but you may be interested by my take on the others.
-- FredB
by FredB @ 01/03/2006 4:04 pm • Permalink •
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Rob Bevan: No, I haven't seen OnlyWire, I'll check it out.
FredB: Nice review! By the way, if anyone wants a beta invite to Diigo, just let me know. Unfortunately, users don't get invites on ma.gnolia, so I can't help out there.
by bsag @ 01/03/2006 6:04 pm • Permalink •
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I'd be glad to take a look @ Diigo.
fredb7(at)gmail.com
Thanks!
by FredB @ 02/03/2006 7:04 pm • Permalink •
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FredB: They've actually just updated their site (much nicer layout, and great search now!), but it seems that I don't have any invites now. Their home page suggests that you should be able to send a request for an invite to info at diigo dot com, so you should be able to try that.
by bsag @ 03/03/2006 11:04 am • Permalink •
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I try that.
Thanks for your time!
by FredB @ 05/03/2006 1:04 am • Permalink •
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Hi, I've used both ma.gnolia and diigo in the last couple of weeks, and both are really quite nicely done. In the end though, I think Diigo will win people over due to its functionality. While ma.gnolia is really quite easy on the eye (and by the way focusing more on a grouping aspect), Diigo has been rolling out feature after feature (and seems to be more about giving the individual more power over the information on the web). Especially after them revamping just about everything and introducing that fabulous bookmarklet, Diigo is definitely going in the right direction.
It's true that delicious users won't be quick to switch, but sooner or later people will be looking for new features, and many of them will find them with Diigo.
by richard @ 11/03/2006 1:03 pm • Permalink •
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