October, 2007

Ma.gnolia Monthly 15: Return of the Newsletter!

It's both easy and hard to believe, but yesterday, February 15, was our first birthday! We've learned enough lessons to fill a book, which we might write someday, but the most important one can be shared in just a few words: Listen to your members because without them a website is just web pages. It's one thing to craft a website, hook up some processing rules and a database, put it on some servers and go live. But when people, all kinds of people, show up and start doing their thing, it becomes something very different. It grows, it surprises you in good ways (awesome avatars, brilliant bookmarks!) and bad (spam). It makes you work harder than you ever expected and it pays off in so many unexpected ways. By listening to members, we've been able to do a great deal with just 3 to 4 people, depending on when you look. If we tried to think it all up ourselves, we wouldn't have a chance. We don't have aspirations of runaway signup numbers and gajillions in revenue. We find that the words "small and remarkable" go together well when thinking about where Ma.gnolia is going. Ma.gnolia as a website is a shell of technical pieces and good looks, but with our members with us it's a truly unique experience. Let's see where the next year takes us. For this month's newsletter, that's just what we'll be doing. We won't have the usual Featured Tags and Groups sections, but we do have the magnolia1yr (http://ma.gnolia.com/tags/magnolia1yr) tag to check out things related to the occasion.

- The Ma.gnolia Team (support@ma.gnolia.com)

Giving Thanks

There's a lot of gratitude to share, and it starts with you, our members. If we didn't say it well enough above, you're our everything. We also owe ongoing thanks to the Happy Cog team, who provided us with a design that is as beautiful to look at as it is a pleasure to use. Of course, there are some friends that we've made along the way as well who have proven invaluable in their advice. One of our earliest members, Sean Brady, deserves special mention. Sean has been a tireless source of alerts, suggestions, help for other members and just being a great guy; Sean, thank you. And finally, we need to give thanks to Tara and Chris of Citizen Agency. Not only do they give us cogent advice and support, but they even generously contributed to our first anniversary by hosting the party at Citizen Space. If you want to see how it looked, check out these incriminating pictures (http://www.flickr.com/photos/citizenagency/391731681/in/set-72157594538272756/) and these with the Ma.gnolia tag at Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/magnolia1yr/). We wish we could also say thanks for every bookmark added to Ma.gnolia, because where would we be without all those nuggets of web gold. Well, as of today, we can start do just that with a little addition we've made to Ma.gnolia. It comes from Chris Messina, and his thoughts on information sharing as philanthropy, and at its core is simply a way to say thank you to someone because you like one of their bookmarks. When you see someone else's bookmark, or when you're copying one, you can give thanks. The person whom you thanked will see that you thanked them. Easy as that. Thanks are just between two people, meaning they can't be viewed by other members. Recent people who thanked you will appear in the sidebar, and you can explore those connections from that point in detail. We think this is one way of keeping the humane aspects of working and playing together online in balance with the technically cool stuff we can pull off. So go spread some good karma, and see what comes back to you from just sharing what you find.

The Year Ahead

In this part of our first anniversary extravaganza, we want to show off some of the upcoming features that we've been working on for you. The Astounding Multi-Bookmark Manager! Since we launched, one of the things people have asked for is a way to manage their bookmarks in large numbers. Or small numbers. Or medium sized numbers. It should rename tags. It should remove old bookmarks. It should slice and dice them, and dress them up for a night on the town. Well guess what? We think we've just about pulled it off. Here's a glimpse of this amaze-o-tool, which we have yet to name. If you can think of a good name, send it in to support@ma.gnolia.com! http://www.flickr.com/photos/larryhalff/392593881/

New Bookmark Views Perhaps one of the strongest criticisms of our design is that our bookmarks take up too much room. We've had requests for the bookmark view to lose a little to a lot of weight, and have held onto the original design, believing that the high information-density needs were best filled elsewhere. But we couldn't ignore that many members who understood that were still advising us to condense the view somewhat. Soon, we'll be introducing re-designed bookmark views that feature a more compact format, and provide room for us to grow the number of features that you can use on a specific bookmark. There will still be a richer and lighter view available, but with both we think you'll be able to work more effectively without the stress of trying to read so much at once. Here's what the new bookmark views will look like. http://www.flickr.com/photos/larryhalff/392593877/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/larryhalff/392593878/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/larryhalff/392595024/

Gardeners for Safer and Spam-Free Bookmarks We're sure that as you've used Ma.gnolia, you've noticed that spam bookmarks get into the service. We recently added Akismet, the WordPress spam-fighting tool, to help us keep it out, but it's a big job. We've come to realize that we need help with this task, and so we're introducing a number of changes that come together under The Gardeners Project. Every Ma.gnolia member will have some gardening tools, with the ability to flag items that as potentially offensive. When enough flags are put on a bookmark, we'll take a closer look and make a call. Some members of the Ma.gnolia community will be granted a larger set of tools, with the ability to train Akismet to recognize spam and respond to abusive behavior. These members will available to contact on a special page, or through the profile of anyone with a special gardener's badge. Each of these special gardeners will also have the ability to promote a very limited number of other members to this role. With extra human eyes working with the Akismet filtering, we think we'll be able to keep Ma.gnolia friendly and reliable.

The Road Ahead

Programmable Ma.gnolia There are lots of things that Ma.gnolia doesn't do, for one reason or another. We know that a strong portion of our members are in software development, and have programming skills. So the smart thing to do seems to be to... make Ma.gnolia programmable! We have two plugin architectures coming up that will do just that. Starting with our mash-in architecture, members will be able to create plugins that incorporate data from websites that are bookmarked. You can see this now when bookmarking a page from Cork'd or Upcoming in Ma.gnolia. We have more mash-ins planned, and they're dead-easy to do, so we're really keen to see what people come up with. A second plugin architecture will be revealed in a couple months or so, but we can't talk about that one quite yet.

Progress On Pro We've mentioned several times in the past year that Ma.gnolia will, at some point, launch a pro-level service. First, everything that Ma.gnolia offers now will continue to be available for free. And, for all the new features that we have in mind, we're careful to make sure that there is something for everyone. Pro-level offerings will be designed to meet the needs of individual power users to small and medium sized groups and organizations. So as a person or group's needs grow, the service can grow with them. We think this is the most fair way to price and divide up the different Pro offerings. Offered on subscription, the service levels will start around $6/month. We'll be talking a lot more about Ma.gnolia Pro in the weeks and months to come, and would love to hear what features you'd most look forward to in Ma.gnolia Pro.

MA.GNOLIA ASKS YOU: THE PERFECT DESKTOP APP? This is the first installment of a new part of the newsletter, in which we'll put out a question each month on a subject where we feel we need some focussed input. Each question will lead to a discussion on that topic in the Ma.gnolia User's Group (http://gnoliasystemsllc.cmail1.com/.aspx/l/147539/0/ma.gnolia.com/groups/ma.gnolia_users). This month's question is: If you had a desktop application for using Ma.gnolia, what's the one perfect thing that you would want it to do? Step up to the microphone at http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/ma.gnolia_users/discussions/301.