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Distributed Communities and the Social Village: How Ma.gnolia creates foundations from Bookmarks
To a bookworm a bookmark is simply a method of not losing your place. For social entrepreneurs like Larry Halff they are the building blocks of online communities. Coming from a cultural anthropology and sociology background Larry was always interested in how people communicate, get together, form groups, and interact. It was partially this interest that led him to launch Ma.gnolia, a human-organized bookmark collective. Recently I sat down with Larry to learn more about how Ma.gnolia changes the way people connect.
Why start a business based around bookmarks?
When we started Ma.gnolia, about three years ago, it was with the intention to create a more community oriented and sharing-enabled take on social bookmarking. Just saving bookmarks on your own desktop is an implicit reference of your interests are and the things you care about. Then Delicious came along: it exposed that bookmark collection publicly and sort of created an emergent community. However there really weren’t tools for people to actually build topically focused communities and share with each other. So at Ma.gnolia we wanted to sort of extend that model and look at ways you can reference something that you may want to not just save for yourself but to share it with friends or with a group of people interested in the same topic. You may want to contribute that information source to a pool where people of similar interests are all sharing the stuff they find on that topic.
For instance if you are interested in the Coen brothers and you want to start finding other people who are also interested in the Coen brothers you could add some bookmarks related to them into Ma.gnolia. You could start a group; put the sites that you discovered about the Coen’s in that group and start to look at who else has bookmarked the same sites you found interesting then invite them to join the group. You would all be able to share all the information you find about the Cohen brothers collectively.
I think what we were trying to do was explicitly acknowledge and encourage the people interacting with each other in building communities rather than just sort of passively letting people see each other’s lists. We want to build applications that encourage positive interactions and people coming together around common interests.
Why the funky spelling of Ma.gnolia?
We were inspired by the movie Magnolia, the one with Tom Cruise, which is about how people’s lives are interrelated and in exposing the common threads that may not be apparent. As you know it is difficult to get good names online these days. Magnolia.com is owned by Exxon which bought it when they bought Magnolia Gas and Electric Company. I doubt we will be purchasing that form them anytime soon.
How do you keep the references organic and keep out the threat of marketing spam?
Ma.gnolia is actually community white listed. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the way Flickr designates people to monitor public search areas. Well, we kind of have the reverse. The community on Ma.gnolia has to say that you are a member in good standing before your bookmarks appear in public search areas. So that basically keeps out the spammers. We have what we call the “Gardeners Program”, where trusted community members can review and flag new members as either being a spambot or a real person.
When it comes to how things are labeled how does the fallibility of the humans who are categorizing the bookmarks impact things? Or is that part of the joy of browsing?
Humans are fallible and Ma.gnolia is not trying to be an authoritative reference on any subject. Rather we are providing content organization tools that allow people who trust each other or people who are in communities with a marked commonality to federate and say, “These are our trusted sources.” It allows people to designate sources they trust whether it is their circle of friends or business associates and gives them the flexibility to decide how they want to organize around those things. It is less about dealing with the fire hose of information from the entire Internet and more about developing specific trusted resources and cultivating communities around those sources.
How did the explosion of social media impact Ma.gnolia?
I think it is been two-sided; we’ve received a lot more interest in general. Overall there has been a lot of interest in the way people can express themselves online. I think that focus is sort of the biggest impact. We have become more than just social bookmarking or simply the sharing of bookmarks in that people see us as another publishing platform, like a blog. Ma.gnolia has become a way for people to represent themselves in a content specific micro-publishing platform. That change in perception has been the biggest impact.
What about the possibility of lash back against the glut of different social platforms?
There is backlash but I think it’s part of an evolution process. One of the reasons we are speaking at Gnomedex is we want to talk about the direction of Ma.gnolia. The trend we see has social media and social networking going in a direction where people have more control of the ways they represent themselves online and on what places they are represented. Building out tools and services in ways that are useful to allow people to maintain control of their content and representation is key.
What about Ma.gnolia’s evolution?
What we are working towards is giving people more tools to provide them better control over who and how they interact with others in their communities. I think that’s sort of the big push. We are looking at the work that Chris Messina is doing with the DiSo project and seeing how we can learn from it.
I think the social media space is going to start seeing technology developed around ways people and groups can be represented across various social sites. Rather than all of these various individual groups being spread out, like having one on the Facebook, one on MySpace and one on Ma.gnolia; people will be able to say this is their group across all the different social spaces. These are the topics I am interested in regardless of what site it is on. I don’t think we are close to that now, but I think it is something we are working toward.
Does OpenID play into that?
I think that OpenID is a key part of it. It is the method in which you can identify who you are across the different sites. One of the ways that you can link yourself to your various group memberships is of course through your open ID.
How do you see this impacting privacy policy and privacy policy concerns?
I’m not a legal expert but I believe that many sites will still have to do their part to enforce current privacy standards. In terms of contact information, I think people will be given more say and new standards will be formed around how and when people want to be contacted. This can be built around people’s OpenIDs allowing them to state “this is how you can contact me and this is when you can contact me”.
How does Magnolia monetize currently?
We sell ads. We are still essentially an R&D type outfit.
Are there ideal partnerships that Magnolia is looking for?
Yeah. We are based in San Francisco and we are in constant contact with people in the same space and are definitely interested in participating in standards development processes. As these messaging, group and content syndication standards are pushed out we are looking to work with others taking on those challenges.
The biggest standard development that we are involved in is in developing OAuth. The sort of tagline is that OAuth is, “Your valet key for the Web”. When you want to give a site or application access to do things with different account of yours OAuth can provide the authentication protocol. For example, let’s say you are on Flickr and want to grab photos to bring into Facebook; you don’t have to give Facebook your username and password. Through OAuth you just undergo this process where you give them permission without having to give them your login credentials. It is a security protocol that is literally like a valet key giving you the ability to control how other sites access your account.
When you give a site your username and password to a different site you trust them to securely store that information. Essentially the problem is that they can now do anything with the account once they have that information. With something like OAuth, you can just give them temporary access. You are in control of how they access your account and you don’t have to undergo this big security risk.
From a culture anthropology perspective how has the internet changed us?
I think the way we’ve organized information has changed a lot. Our brains are more focused around holding and remembering references to things rather than holding and remembering things themselves. I think our communication and capacity to communicate is a lot broader. Without the geographical constraints or the temporal limits we can keep a lot more connections open on a much larger scale. Whereas before to keep the connection open you would need to sit down and write a long letter or be in the same place at the same time.
What about the old idea of everybody being raised by the village? Can online communities fulfill the role of the village?
Yeah I think that they already do. People do form more distributed communities and probably more ad hoc ones around actual interests rather than geographic proximity. I think it’s a different kind of relationship than you have with the people who live around you but I think that people are definitely forming those communities and they are no less valuable.
I use for business related stuff del.icio.us, because I included it in my RSS feed with all my blog posts at RN and SEJ.
For my personal and business bookmarks (= all my bookmarks) I am using the little known bookmarking service from Europe called Mister-Wong.
I like their easy import and export tools and what really sold me the most was the ability to search my own bookmarks via a full-text search and add the search to my custom search providers in IE and Firefox. They also allow the creation of groups where you and others can add specific bookmarks to, if they become a group member. Access to the group bookmarks is public though. I created a bunch of groups myself, when they introduced the feature, including “Affiliates”, “Advertising”, “Marketing”, “SEO”, “SEM”, “Web 2.0″ and “WebAnalytics”.
I created an account at Magnolia, but never really used it. I never got sold on their service really, but I heard from others that they like it and also prefer it over del.icio.us (now also available via delicious.com hehe)
I have been assimilated and it goes into the Google notebook. just like that…
-wayne
haha Wayne…
I just noticed that Mister-Wong discontinued the groups feature.. why? I dunno, but I am going to find out… bummer though.