Ma.gnolia Blog: Is it Two Already?
Well, here we are in the middle of February and we find ourselves at another milestone: today marks 2 years of Ma.gnolia on the web! Like all anniversaries, it’s a good time to look back and take stock of how far we’ve come, and where we’re heading.
First thing’s first: we have to send out a big thanks to all our members, whether you’ve been with us from the start or you just arrived today. We want you to know that we appreciate your presence here and the contributions you make, however big or small.
Rather than recount all the little things we worked on over the past year, let’s look at some of the major projects that we took on, and how those have taken us down a somewhat different path than we expected.
Give Thanks
The first is a feature that we launched on Ma.gnolia’s birthday last year: Give Thanks. This idea, which is quite simple, and enormously common in our regular person-to-person actions, is almost completely absent in social software. We started with this feature on the site itself, then soon added it to the RSS feeds so that people reading there could participate without having to visit the site just to say thanks.
There are lots of things on the web that look like Thanks, like Props, +1s, Thumbs Up, and so on, but they seemed to create their own little economies that never quite capture the feeling we get from a simple expression of gratitude. As a person-to-person feature, Give Thanks has been noted by many bloggers and presenters looking to educate audiences on making applications more humane and geared for creating positive social experiences.
How does Give Thanks do in the community? It’s not a runaway, click-a-second feature, but its use is very steady, telling us that people make those clicks thoughtfully. When you get a Thanks from someone, it means something, and being able to create that experience is something we’re very proud of.
Shortly into Year 2, we were asked to participate in the launch of the Facebook application platform with our own entry, which incidentally has nothing to do with vampires, zombies or inviting the known universe.
This project gave us a chance to think about Ma.gnolia’s features projecting into other environments, and challenged our assumptions about what can be done outside of the regular website and RSS model. As we worked on creating the authorization flow for the Facebook application, we realized that we could simplify the sign-in process for Ma.gnolia with that integration.
And behold, on the sign-in page, Ma.gnolia members could sign in with their Facebook accounts. The magic part is that, as with OpenID, Ma.gnolia never sees your Facebook password, making it safe and just a bit easier on members who don’t really need to remember yet another password. That kind of magic got us excited, and it turned out to be just the beginning.
OAuth
Through Year 2 we noticed a real growth in OpenID use at Ma.gnolia, and while a success in itself, that growth also created an issue for us: how were we going to make exisitng integrated applications, such as our Ma.rker Dashboard widget, accept OpenID. Our friends at Twitter were facing the same problem, and before long we were neck-deep with a crew of experts in web apps and online security.
The result is the OAuth spec, which enables web users to authorize a desktop, mobile or web application’s access your data stored on another site, without having to give the application your password to the remote data.
Not only are we proud to have worked on the spec with the team that put it together, but we’re especially proud to have been the first web service to implement OAuth, marking the release of version 2 of our API. As proud as we are, we realize that OAuth has commanded a great deal of attention and effort from our small team, taking away from some of the features we expected to be developing this year.
That tradeoff made Ma.gnolia much more of an R&D space than a web business. It’s geeky, it’s very much in the plumbing, and we know it’s not of interest to everyone. But we think it’s enormously important for the future of the web, where more applications will be talking to each other and doing things on our behalf. In that near-future world, we’ll all be better off not having our passwords stored on any number of sites, just waiting for an accident or theft. However far off our planned course we’ve wandered in the work on OAuth, we’re all ending up in a better place.
Ma.gnolia Mobile
The final major feature to look back on is also about the future. With the release of the iPhone, the game for mobile web use has changed. Without missing a beat, and without leaving out exisitng mobile devices, Ma.gnolia went mobile with a special part of the site optimized for use not only with a small screen, but for the scenarios where we need links on the go.
Ma.gnolia Mobile has been very well received, and, of course, looks great on an iPhone or older generation device. Once you go mobile, there’s not much going back, and as we go into Year 3 a major challenge will be to find ways of extending what makes Ma.gnolia special into all the places where it can help make life a little easier.
Be Social
Looking back, it’s a short list of big advances, both in Ma.gnolia and at the edges of the emerging social web. Speaking of social and the web, we definitely need to give a wave to all the people we’ve come to know in the past year. From members to fellow Web 2.0 developers to people who haven’t even heard of us but are curious, we’ve greeted more friendly faces and had more good conversations than we can count.
That’s our year in review. The investments in the less visible, technical aspects strengthens our foundation for growth and more contributions to a more open and interoperable web that supports us as we move through life. Raise a cheer with us in celebration, and here’s to the start of Year 3!
Posted by Todd on February 15, 2008 | Mark This Post
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Laurent on February 15, 2008
Happy Birthday!!!