Social bookmarking is a pretty crowded field on the Web, with delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us) taking the greatest amount of mindshare, although I have no idea if they’re still holding the majority of the market. The increased use of bookmarking tool aggregators like ShareThis show that the gaggle of bookmarking sites is a little confusing for everyone. In this kind of market, taking the Free Network Service road is a great chance to differentiate.

I hope that the plan to make their “next version”, dubbed “M2″, Free Software doesn’t devolve into never making the software Free and Open Source. I also hope they review carefully the Open Software Service Definition and consider making ma.gnolia.com an OSSD-compliant site. Ma.gnolia.com already allows users to apply a Creative Commons license to their bookmark stream, although they default to the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike which doesn’t meet the Free Cultural Works Definition. I think they should consider long and hard how to make all data (except data the user marks as private) Open Culture.

What I find most heartening is the M2 project charter (PDF, 190KB), which shows they’ve really thought through the distributed nature of the software. As I mentioned with identi.ca, making a social networking site’s software Open Source is an empty gesture if people on different servers can’t connect socially. It looks like M2 will have ways to aggregate various M2 instances together, and even aggregate the aggregators.

Good luck to Ma.gnolia.com on this project. I hope they can rally a community around it, reach out to other Open Source bookmarking projects to implement a common distributed protocol, and generally just rock out. A Free Network Service for social bookmarking would be an excellent addition to an open software services ecology.