I have mentioned my preference for Ma.gnolia as a social bookmark manager before. The Ma.gnolia service continues to grow, and the features they are implementing continue to verify my decision to move all of my bookmarks there. You can get a glimpse of what has changed at Ma.gnolia recent on the Ma.gnolia Blog. I have 1827 bookmarks now, and I am sporting a pretty hefty 1040 tags in the system. With all of this information I tend to think a lot about new, and better (at least to my mind) ways to access it. I was thinking about new ways to use all of this information in the car on the way to work today, and I came up with 8 suggestions for new Ma.gnolia features. These are not presented in any particular order.
- Boolean Tag Searches: Ma.gnolia has the ability to search for multiple tags, you simply add additional comma separated tags to the search. This AND search is very helpful, but I would love to see this taken to the next step with the addition of an OR operator and especially a NOT operator. When you get to more than a few hundred tags the ability to include and exclude just the set you want is important.
- Search for un-tagged bookmarks: Whether it is snap marked or just due to laziness I know I have a few dozen un-tagged bookmarks out there. I would really like to be able to find them, and get them tagged.
- Include a tag with the Snap Mark bookmarklet: I love to Snap Mark. I don’t always have time to tag correctly, and I want to get the bookmark into the system. I can mark and go very fast with snap mark. Playing off of the item above, I would love to see the snap mark feature offer to include a default tag that I can search for later. Either make it a static tag (like snap marked) or a tag that each user can define via the profile.
- Ability to remove a star: Perhaps there is a way to do this, but I have not found it. I would like to un-star some items. I initially started staring things based on some general “I like this site” criteria. I try to use stars now to show how useful a site is to me, or how often I might visit that site. I have a few bookmarks that I would prefer to completely unstar.
- Ability to sort search results: It would be very cool if search results were sortable based on different criteria. Off the top of my head I would love to be able to sort results based on date added (most recent or oldest at the top), number of stars, or even how often I use a bookmark. This would make stars much more useful, especially given how I am using them.
- Discussions for bookmarks: We can discuss things in groups, but I think it would be great to have discussions relating to individual bookmarks. Discussions are not used a great deal today, but I have sent and received a couple of “cool bookmark” e-mails in the past couple of weeks. It would be a nice addition to just pop over to the detail page and post a quick thanks to those who referenced it before me. It would also be fun to discuss some of the more unusual pages that pass through Ma.gnolia. I often wonder why people mark things.
- Related tags while tagging: There is already a great deal of meta data in Ma.gnolia, and Roots has started to expose much of it. I would love to see a related tags interface when I am actually tagging a bookmark though. Perhaps this is something that will be added to future changes to Roots. It is always nice to get tagging suggestions.
- Related bookmarks on detail page: Again, using the metadata already in the system, it seems that a short list of related bookmarks could be displayed on the detail page for bookmarks. Something to aid in research, and in finding items that might otherwise stay hidden.
I am a wishlist kind of guy, and am certain to always have ideas for things to change, but I do hope that some of these suggestions make it into the product. I would especially like to see the search options expanded. If you are looking for a way to store your bookmarks online, make your bookmarks available to you anywhere, and find new and interesting content on the Internet, you should look at Ma.gnolia.