| The Holiday Edition |
That time of the year is upon us: the holidays have arrived. As we get ready to welcome the change of seasons and close out '07 on the Western calendar, we thought we'd also turn out our last newsletter of the year to wish everyone the best for the upcoming holidays, however you spend them.
Over the holidays, we'll be spending time with family and friends as well. Ma.gnolia's essentials will be watched over, as always, but less than critical support issues will be answered after we're back to the regular schedule.
Wishing you a safe and happy holiday,
- The Ma.gnolia Team
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| Seasonal Decorations, Old and New |
| Holiday Avatars are Back! |
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Last year at this time we released a handful of holiday-themed avatars, and this year we're proud to bring them back for use with your personal and group profiles. The holiday avatars appear when you choose to edit your avatar for your profile or group, and will be available for selection only until the new year. After that, any holiday avatars in use will stay in use until they are changed to something else.
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| New Flower Variations |
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If you're online over the holidays, keep your eye on the Ma.gnolia logo as we sport some fun themed replacements for some of the special days coming up (hint: think solstice, christmas, and new year). Once again, Cindy Li's fantastic work will be making Ma.gnolia a bit more beautiful with her holiday logo stylings. In the new year we'll launch a gallery to show off our holiday logos after their debuts.
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| News from the Workbench |
Next, let's check in to see what the Ma.gnolia code weavers have been up to to get an idea of what's in store for the start of '08.
This December, we faced some unexpected battles with some bugs, especially surrounding feeds. It's never fun to be pulled off planned work, but some technical sleuthing and deft debugging has brought Ma.gnolia back to its spiffy and reliable self. The collaborations that solved these problems crossed international boundaries and included members, partners and our own team, with communication happening through Pibb, Satisfaction, Twitter and iChat. Some days this whole Internet thing really works!
With the new year, we'll also be seeing a change in the focus of our development efforts. After a series of releases that grow Ma.gnolia as a web service, such as OAuth, or the Developer Center and Application Showcase. These developments will make Ma.gnolia-enabled applications easier to create and spread to new users. In the new year, we'll be returning to our bookmarking and publishing features. The first of these changes, a new and more flexible search engine, has quietly been rolling out. Other changes will bring some great new tricks to bookmark organization, tagging, and a twist to tag separators. Stay tuned for those changes as they happen.
Finally, we'll be delivering on two packages of premium features for personal bookmark collections and groups. Since we do like our surprises, we'll hold back on all the details until we're ready to lift the curtain, but we're very excited about how the range of member requests that we'll be able to satisfy with these packages. With all that we've got planned, we just might need a bigger newsletter in '08.
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| Two New Web Connections |
| Bookmark Synching with Nsyght (through OAuth!) |
Nsyght is an alpha-stage service is developing an innovative approach to searching the web through the wisdom of social information communities like Ma.gnolia. Almost immediately after we released support for OAuth, Nsyght was the first application to integrate with Ma.gnolia under the newer, safer, and absolutely sexier process.
Nsyght's integration allows your Ma.gnolia bookmarks to be included in Nsyght search results, and for items you find from Nsync that you want to save back to Ma.gnolia.
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| Attention Tracking with APML |
Attention tracking is a concept that sounds sinister, but is really about empowering web users. Tracking your attention makes you the owner of your web surfing history, rather than just leaving our web footprints to the individual websites that we use. Engagd is helping to lay the groundwork for a future where our Attention data can help tune the way we work with the web and put ownership of where we browse to in our hands, where it belongs. As an emerging technology APML is in early days, and is largely for the curious as there are few applications that support APML at this time. To learn more, check out the
With Engagd doing the real work behind the scenes, we've added early support for creating APML (attention profile markup language) from your bookmark collections. You can turn it on at the Bookmarks tab of your account screen (go to the You menu and click Your Profile to get started). The Attention data produced is available only to you, and is anonymized in the Engagd system, so this is one case where your data is truly for your eyes only.
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