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Ma.gnolia Blog

Ads On, and Ads-OffOctober 7

Months ago we decided to lighten up Ma.gnolia a bit by turning ads off for signed in members. We said at that point that we wouldn’t bring them back without a way to turn them off. Then we got distracted with all sorts of other stuff.

With a big part of Ma.gnolia 2 being a business model for sustaining and growing the service, we thought it wise to get an early start on subscription-based enhancements to the Ma.gnolia experience.

When you put those two ideas together, you end up with today’s announcement that ads are back on Ma.gnolia, and that you can turn them off. With a twist.

Treat Yourself, and Bring Enough to Share

The obvious question is ‘how much does it cost to turn off ads?” so let’s not dance around that. There are two choices:

- Option 1: $7.95/year.

- Option 2: $24.95/year

Why two prices? That’s the twist.

Both options remove ads from your use of Ma.gnolia, and give some extra to others.

Option 1 also removes ads for other people when they view your bookmarks, tags and profile.

Option 2 does the same as Option 1, and extends to your groups, so that ads aren’t shown to people when they visit the groups you manage.

So no matter which option you choose, you’ll be extending the benefits to others interested in what you’re doing in Ma.gnolia.

We think this offering is a 3-way win

A win for Ma.gnolia,

Last-Minute Notes for a New HomepageSeptember 29

Today we’re rolling out a new kind of homepage, which you already know about if you’ve been reading our recent posts.

The Stream, along with Picks, collects activity from across Ma.gnolia from the people you follow (formerly known as Contacts).

This change is a pretty strong shift from what you’ve come to know in your personal homepage, and it’s being built incrementally so you’ll see a lot of changes happen here in the coming weeks.

We understand that not everyone enjoys being in the middle of a renovation, so the old homepage view is still available from the bottom of the Stream. Just click Classic View and you’ll be back in familiar territory.

Also be sure to check out the link to your Visibility Settings, which determine who can see the groups you join, bookmarks you save and so on. For each new activity that we add to the Stream, you’ll be able to specify who can see that. For example, if you want everyone to see the bookmarks you save, but only those you follow to see the groups you join, but nobody to see the new people you choose to follow, you can do that from the Visibility Settings.

And on Your Right…

Another change that comes with the move to a Stream homepage is that we’ve added a piece to our trusty sidebar.

Picking the Good StuffSeptember 26

Yesterday we talked about bringing an Activity Stream model into Ma.gnolia, and today we want to talk about what we’ve done to extend that model to make it more useful than just a bunch of stuff floating by.

Activity streams do a great job of pulling together disparate pieces of news. But they can also create tension between two critical tasks for the homepage – surveying new information and following up on items of interest – into the same space. Wait too long to follow something interesting in the Stream, and before long it can slip out of view. Moreover, the activity of the Stream seemed to dead-end at each individual, unless that person generates their own activity on an item like also joining a new group or saving a bookmark from one someone else found. That didn’t seem right.

So our thinking was: things are going by in the stream, what should we do if we see something we’re curious about, but not enough to actually commit to our own stuff? We pick them out of the stream to study later, and so Picks came to be.

Picks, Illustrated

Every new item in your Stream starts out unpicked. You can tell it’s unpicked because it has a little flower outline. Clicking the icon changes outline into flower, and adds the items to the Your Picks tab.

Jumping into the StreamSeptember 25

Since Larry announced the Ma.gnolia 2 project last month, we’ve been working on two parallel paths to get the project moving: pulling together design documents and building the first key piece of M2, inside the current version that we all use now. It’s that piece that we want to talk about today.

A key shift between Ma.gnolia 1 and 2 will be a stronger focus on the recent activity and attention of individuals and groups you like. This change is a growing trend among social web apps, and a way to make a much richer spectrum of recent activity available from a central point.

We’re building this feature now because we think it needs actual use before how it should work will be clear. To that end, next week we’ll be turning on the first version of the Ma.gnolia Stream.

To the right is a preview of what the Stream will look like; which you can of course click to get a better view.

The Stream replaces the homepage you see when you sign in, and shows what’s happening in your circle of groups and individuals: new bookmarks, groups joined, and new people followed will be the first actions shown. You’ll also see Thanks given to you f

The Open Road AheadAugust 22

Today at Gnomedex in Seattle, we’re kicking off a project bigger than any we’ve taken on since starting Ma.gnolia. It’s brighter than a snazzy feature, and more than a social bookmarking service. It’s going to define where Ma.gnolia is heading, in a way that makes room at the table for everyone.

Much of Ma.gnolia’s development is a balancing act between the resources of a small team and the various, and sometimes contradictory things that people look for in a social bookmarking service. As the web moves quickly, even our ideas of what a social bookmarking application can and should be have changed, but we think that we see enough of where things are heading to head there ourselves.

In the past year, Ma.gnolia has focussed on building in-roads to better models of online identity and service-to-service interaction using open standards. We’ve built on web standards, embraced microformats, pushed the envelope with OpenID and contributed to the development of OAuth. More and more, we look for ways to open Ma.gnolia to innovations and needs that we couldn’t have thought of or met on our own.

It begs the question of how open it can go?

We’re going to find out, with today’s announcement of Ma.gnolia 2, or M2 for short. M2 is a ground-up rewrite of Ma.gnolia, re-creating features we love today, taking a second run at what didn’t worked as well as planned, on a distributed, service-based architecture designed to handle the larg