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Magnolia M2: Free and Open Source Social Bookmarking

August 28, 2008 in development, distributed software, fellow travellers by evan | No comments

It’s interesting to see that fairly popular social bookmarking site Magnolia has announced their plan to make the next version of their software Free and Open Source Software. Magnolia’s had an “open” strategy for a while, with support of OpenID for authentication, xFolk for bookmarks HTML, and other open-ish things that give them an edge in the early adopter community.

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.

Interview with Steve Ivy of the DiSo Project

August 24, 2008 in development, distributed software, fellow travellers, interview, standards by evan | 4 comments

The announcement of the DiSo Project in December of 2007 was a great encouragement for people on the Web who are worried about identity silos, “walled gardens”, and user lock-in on social networking platforms. Since so many of these subjects are closely related to user autonomy, I did an interview with Steve Ivy about the origins and goals of DiSo, current progress, and where he things things are going in the future.

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