Feature Suggestions

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Have something you'd like to see in Ma.gnolia? We want to know! As the wiki has been transitioned to a developer focus, we're happy to hear suggestions on our Get Satisfaction page. Previous suggestions are preserved and answered here, with responses from Ma.gnolia are formatted in italics.

Show the average rating (from group members) of links listed in group view. This lets you see what links the group as a whole finds most useful. Currently the group rating is set by the last person who bothered to set it, which is not so useful. --Sebpaquet 07:31, 1 August 2008 (PDT)

Ability to use HTML tags (esp. links) in the description field. With the new blog integration, it would help me to write a better description of my bookmarks.--Flow14 20:20, 1 November 2007 (PDT)

Icon for Featured Linkers Might aid navigation to have a small icon, like the Gardeners' trowel, for Featured Linkers, in all the same places. --Carla 11:09, 3 September 2007 (PDT)

"Quick Edit" Option in List View: In short, I desperately wish there was a way to "quick edit" the tags on a bookmark. Example of what I mean, I use the ma.gnolia firefox plugin for most of my bookmarks, and often don't take the time to add-in tags when I make it. So I have a long list of untagged bookmarks, I love the fact that I can now filter it to just these with a blank search (my other much needed feature :-))...but would love a way to "quick" edit a bookmark with maybe an ajax pop-up or something, it gets really slow to try to edit every bookmark by having to load the individual page, if I could just click an edit button and get a pop-up or something that allows me to quick edit the tag field, that would rock, then I could stay on one page

More roles for collaboration, let's take a large focus group, let's say we want to use our bookmarking activity also for keeping public relations --> we need that some people will specialize in keeping relations, so we need people who add bookmarks, people who constantly check them in order to see if they still work, people who use that bookmarks to keep contacts with the various web sites. It would be nice and useful to have the possibility of assigning roles directly in Ma.gnolia instead of developing an external database. It will also be useful to have a way of marking who is caring a specific subset of links, I mean at present we know who posted that links, but we need an extra information about who is maintaining them with the relations involved.

Import from Simpy. Simpy is dead - the webmaster is no longer around to keep out spam and patch security holes. Attempting to use Simpy's browser bookmarks export with Ma.gnolia's bookmarks import failed. A direct import mechanism would be awesome.

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Export bookmarks with tags

Option for export bookmarks with tags or not

  • Option firefox export tags → folders or tags in firefox 3.0
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Suggested sites

It would be really useful if when you add a bookmark for a site, you were presented with a list of similar sites you might be interested in. A bit like the way amazon recommends other books when you buy a book. Cross referencing your tags and the url with similar tags and possibly ranking by popularity and date. Most of the new sites i bookmark i find because i'm researching something, so peer suggestions are always good.

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Answered Requests

Safari import/sync With the iPhone making a big impact in mobile browsing and helping Safari to become an important player, it would be great to have even basic import/export options, or even a full-blown sync ability. Even if it's via an external app and not an actual plugin, this will help your users keep their 'marks synched across Ma.gnolia, Safari and the iPhone. (--dcharti)

We have something in the works for the iPhone that will get you to your bookmarks without any synching. As for synching between even one browser, it's something we see value in but it's beyond what we can pull off for now.

Integrated search: Why not search both tags and titles, even description when searching? Also, why not display results in your bookmarks and then, below that, everyone else's?

Search gets tricky when working with several million bookmarks. Combining the tag index with the title and description index would probably grind the server to a halt because there would be so much info to search. Moreover, tags are different from titles and descriptions because they're keywords as opposed to, well, just words. We know searching is tough right now and that splitting things between different types of data doesn't always work. This is a long term thing that we'll always have to keep looking at to improve, but we appreciate the thoughts even when we can't act on them immediately.

Website Reminder...or something. I'm not exactly sure what this could be yet. Here's the problem: I open a ton of tabs and even windows full of tabs and it becomes basically a 'to-do' list of things to read and do. I wonder if Magnolia could have some kind of queue or 'look at later' feature for websites that you want to read but don't have time yet or want to look at again in a certain amount of time. Thoughts?

We have almost exactly what you've described here mostly designed and planned for the next couple months. It's great to see we have an early beta tester for it now :)

Thumbnails in List View - It would be nice to have the thumbnails show up next to the bookmarks in the list views. (--drakecaiman)

We'll give the new bookmark views a little time to settle in, and will play with the design a bit to see if thumbnails can work in list views. The immediate impression is that they might have too much visual weight to work well in a list view, but there may be some uses of that arrangement.

Favicons - I would like to see favicons as well as thumbnails for bookmarks. Having the thumbnails is really nice, but sometimes I identify a bookmark quicker by its icon. (--drakecaiman)

Usually we show favicons for sites that we integrate with, but maybe it's time for a second look at that practice. Good idea - we'll see if we can make it fit.

Group Membership - When viewing all members of a large group like Web Design, the page takes forever to load. It would be nice to have it paginate, preferably by alpha (all user names that start with 'b') instead of a numerical pagination. At the moment, if you want to make someone a moderator, or ban an account, you have to wait a long time for the page to load and then locate the right account on the page. An alternate method, or just another useful tool would be the ability to click on a user icon or name and have the ability to promote or ban them right without loading a new page. (--BaldTechnologist)

Gotcha. We've added a ticket to paginate the results of member lists in groups. We plan to add menus that are activated from the avatar, which should make for easier banning in group situations. Until then, paginating the list of group members is the best we can do to make life easier.

  • The ability to add html to the decription/details area of a bookmark. Among other things, would allow for you to do a (via: [link]) or reference another site in the bookmark. (--mrwarren)

We have some html-style text formatting on the way, but have some different plans for handling related links of the type you describe.

  • An interface to show tags that have only been applied to one bookmark. Basically a way to review and weed-out hardly used tags to remove clutter. (--jsairers)

While it can't show tags that are applied to just one bookmark, the tag cloud does show by relative size how many bookmarks a given tag has been applied to. I think we can do a better job of showing those differences, possibly adding the number of bookmarks per tag to the hover text when looking at your own cloud.

  • A way to sort search results for "titles and descriptions" by date. Occasionally, I would like to see the newest first. (--jsairers)

We'd like to add sorting to any bookmark list, not just the titles and description searches.

  • An interface to manage tags inside of a group. For instance, renaming an existing tag inside of a group. (--jsairers)

For sure! We'll be adding the tag management tool that is found on personal collections to groups, available to group managers and moderators.

  • A way to select from a group's tags when adding a new bookmark to that particular group to keep the taxonomy consistent. (--jsairers)

This is a great suggestion. We'll implement it right after we get tags from everyone else working when adding a bookmark to a personal collection.

  • I think it would be very cool if when I bookmark a site, Ma.gnolia would parse that site for an RSS/Atom Feed. If it finds one, add the feed to the record for the bookmark. It would also be beneficial to have the option to include a feed url when a bookamrk is captured. Basically, every bookmark would have the potential to have two urls...the base and the feed. If the OPML output of a group or search could be modified to be based on the feed urls you would end up with a very slick way to keep up to date with web feeds. (--Seanabrady)

Some very interesting possibilities there. We'll have to probe for how widely this could be used by people. There are lots of possibilities with bookmarking the feeds themselves, and we're looking at those as well.

  • I would really like to see a notes section added when bookmarking a site. It would be useful for pointing out elements of the site that standout, for example, comments on navigation could be added, etc...

We see some real value in doing this as well. Great suggestion, and we'll be making something like this happen.

  • Ability to group similar tags in "groups" (e.g.: A script "group" could contain the tags ajax, javascript, dhtml, etc.).

Ah smart thinking. We will be accommodating this request in the next few months. Stay tuned for this one.

  • Would it be possible to automatically import links from an RSS feed. For example, I'd like my shared items from Google Reader to be picked up by ma.gnolia. Even better would be multiple feeds!

Every item in the feed? That seems like it would produce a lot of bookmarks, and sadly it would be a major opening for spam. We think bookmarking works best when it's not so strongly automated.

We have to agree. We've been casually looking for a short name url to use, but haven't had much luck yet. Any ideas from creative domain pickers?

  • It would be nice if one could exclude certain users' bookmarks from a search - and perhaps save this list of "excluded users" so that it would be the default when searching in the future.

How about searching just your contacts and groups? That way you have a whitelist of trusted sources rather than a blacklist of untrusted ones, and the trusted list is bound to be shorter than the untrusted. We'll look at changing the search to include a contacts and groups option.

  • Let users tag discussions? (--SteveIvy)

We had this in the original design for discussions but it didn't feel quite right. It's worth revisiting when we do take another pass at discussions.

  • Ability to turn off sections like "popular discussions" or hide certain discussions "i don't want to see this"
  • I agree with turning off "popular discussions" -- I am not sure it is work safe otherwise (--daddydave)
  • side bar for recent bookmarks from my contacts/my groups (--SteveIvy)
  • let users select their sidebar groups (where the sidebar is the collection of links to the right of my bookmarks) (--SteveIvy)

Even though we can't guarantee a safe for work list of discussions and bookmarks all the time, we think it's pretty valuable to be able to see what the rest of the community is up to. Selective hiding of discussions might be a way to manage that, and it's a good idea. When we look at the sidebar content segments, specifically, our inclination is more towards letting people tune the content sources rather than turn off the segment altogether.

  • More complete group management. I'd like to be able to make someone else the manager and leave a group I started.

Better group management tools are on the way, but your specific suggestion isn't one we had thought of - it's a great one! Thanks!

  • Extend the ratings system to support -1. Then use this info to add vote-links to bookmarks. (--SteveIvy)

We're not fully decided on votelinks yet, but we're not closed to this at all.

  • In a bookmarks listing it would be nice to see the number of people who've bookmarked a link right in each links description without having to first go into the detailed view. (--zerok)

We hear you. This would be an uncertain move for us, as we're not a place that's about popularity and voting up or down links, but if we do decide to go for it, we have the space for it in the interface picked out.

  • It would be great if Ma.gnolia made use of Trackback/pings to indicate to the site being bookmarked that a page has been added to Ma.gnolia. It would also be useful for spreading the word about Ma.gnolia. (--BaldTechnologist)

Interesting idea, Alex. I've heard people say from time to time that trackbacks are dead, due to the abuse they've suffered from spammers, but I still see them in use quite a lot. We'll keep this in mind and ask for some opinions.

  • I want my ma.gnolia bookmarks to be copied to my Firefox bookmarks on a regular basis, just as the foxylicious addon does with, well, you know. Without an addon that does this, it is often easier to just search Google and find the site again, rather than find it in my ma.gnolia bookmarks. It should be easy to write with your mirrord API, I would write it myself if I had time. (--daddydave)

The Mirrord API should indeed make this easy. Most of the work of making a del.icio.us tool work with Ma.gnolia is just changing the URL to the API. If that doesn't do it all, we can certainly help out with any problem spots. Any brave souls willing to try?

  • Batch operations on your bookmarks. I'd love it if you could select a bunch of bookmarks and, say, make them public/private, or share them with a group, all in one go. This would make getting started much simpler. (--ravasthi)

Batch management is on the way. We have the interface almost finished and need to do some work to make sure it's friendly to all browsers.

  • Option to mark bookmarks as 18+ (age).

We've talked about flagging for offensiveness, and possibly for adult material. Should there be a differentiation or just one flag for 'may offend'? By the way, spam flagging will be introduced if our current strategy for automated spam removal doesn't pan out.

  • Bookmark categories, additionaly to tag organization

Unfortunately we just don't see how mixing hierarchical and non-hierarchical organization systems would work well, because one ends up facing the same problems that tagging was designed to solve.

  • I agree with the hosts that having to use both categories and tags would be unwieldy. Spurl does this, and while at first it seems like it would be handy, the "category" features ended up lagging behind the "tag" features. (--daddydave) This is also why I have trouble latching on to groups. If I have a tag of css or freeware, isn't a group of css or freeware redundant? (--daddydave)

Neat idea. We'll discuss to see if we can make it work.

  • The ability to stay in sync with your del.icio.us account without having to re-upload the ALL your del.icio.us bookmarks again.

If we can find a nice clean way to do this then we will, but to be clear we won't be offering two-way synchronization.

  • Pausing and hovering over a tag in a tag cloud shows how many bookmarks are using that tag.

Great idea. Provided there are no technical hurdles I think we can do this.

  • An easier way to browse through hundreds or thousands of bookmarks that get returned by a search. This is a big, vague request, so here are my two cents on features that might contribute to better navigation (as long as they don't interfere with the excellent usability of the site):
    • A mini tag cloud at the top of or beside search results. If you click on a tag there, all results that don't have that tag become excluded from the results. (This feature would sort of extend the tag cloud that you see for a user or a group.)
    • Going hand in hand with the previous idea, the ability to exclude tags from the search results using a tag cloud.
    • The ability forward and reverse sort the search results based on either their "recentness", "hotness", or number of bookmarks.
    • A list of the hottest or most recent bookmarks within the scope of the current search.

That's a huge request, and satisfying it would require some serious redesign work. We're nowhere close to being able to do all this, but will keep it in mind as we roll out new bookmark views. It really might start with making sensible ways to refine searches, rather than emphasize manual browsing.

  • Ma.gnolia favicon for this wiki.

Great idea! We'll do it!

  • Stars (rating) and possibility to add the bookmark to a group in the "Add a bookmark" feature (the one under "Find a bookmark")

We'll be changing this feature so that it works more like other methods of adding a bookmark, including the star rating and copying to a group.

  • Sent folder in the messages

We agree - this is on the way

  • Statistics for the users with the most bookmarks, the top bookmarked sites, the biggest groups, who contributed most links to groups etc. in numbers (the term "hot" doesn't say much about the numbers, also it's not sorted)

We hear you on the desire for stats, but we're not into pulling statistics that encourage digg-like behavior or SEO-like data. When we do release stats, we hope to make them more meaningful and not something that can be gamed easily. As for hot bookmarks, we're just more about the content than the numbers, because the content is what people click through for.

  • 1. Setting in the preferences for "View all" in groups or own bookmark overview per default
  • 2. Setting in the preferences to hide "Most recent bookmarks" from own bookmarks, contacts and groups; to hide the tags and "saved by" information in the bookmark overview per default

We'll look at customization when we re-work the personal bookmarks page, but this won't happen for some time.

  • 3. Setting in the preferences to remove "View details" and "Edit details" and show them as additional buttons in the button list (e.g. after "Send bookmark to group") per default
  • 1, 2 and 3 above could be part of one setting in the preferences like "Short bookmark overview"

Even combined, these suggestions would create a several new preferences, and we feel that people and software tend to work better when they don't have too many choices. We're just about done re-designing the compact and standard bookmark views to take up less space, but we just can't support very precisely customized views like these. Hopefully the new bookmark views will solve the problems that custom bookmark views are proposed to solve.

  • Ability to mass import the bookmarks of another user to own magnolia bookmarks

Good timing. We've been talking about this kind of feature, but can't come up many scenarios for copying large numbers of another user's bookmarks. Instead, adding that person as a contact makes their bookmarks more readily available to your own searches. We will support copying up to 25 of another person's bookmarks at a time, possibly more if the demand is there.

  • Bookmark overview sortable by criteria like rating, title, date etc.

Sorting is on the way, but we haven't worked out the criteria yet.

  • Bookmark categories, additionaly to tag organization

Unfortunately we just don't see how mixing hierarchical and non-hierarchical organization systems would work well, because one ends up facing the same problems that tagging was designed to solve. However, we do have groups which can stand in for folders, and we will be introducing a feature that should take care of the problems that categories are proposed to solve.

  • Field (preferably drop-down list) to define the language of a website (extra entry in the list for multi-language sites)and visible in the bookmark overview (or alternatively hidden per preferences). It would be very useful for english speaking users to see the language information right at the bookmark overviews (like between "Tags" and "Saved by...") in Ma.gnolia, so the non-english speaking bookmark owner doesn't have to write every time "in german/spanish/italian/french/whatever language" into the bookmark description. This is what the original idea was. But your idea of integrating it even into search is great. (bold text was added after your answer, so you can change it back after you read it)

Very interesting idea. It's doubtful that this would lead to new preferences, but it would definitely be added to advanced search options if we decide to pursue it.

  • User online status visible for other users

We can consider that. As with stats, we would want to add this only where we see it being really useful. What benefits can we bring from knowing that someone else is on Ma.gnolia at the same time? Does it actually work with the way we use Ma.gnolia?

  • Information on when a user was last online

Good suggestion. Added to the list for changes to the profile page.

  • Favicon support (favicon displayed in front of the bookmark in the bookmark overview)

This will be available early next year, but with a twist that has yet to be revealed. Stay tuned!

  • Link validation

This will be introduced to our Pro-level services, to be released early next year.

  • Description Field in exported bookmark files are filled with the text from the Description Field from Magnolia (now it is filled with the Site name and tags).

We export bookmarks in a format that can be imported into browsers, which means they can also be imported into most other bookmarking services. There's no standard way to deal with descriptions, as they aren't supported in the browser bookmark data models as far as I know. If it's possible we'll do it, as descriptions are valuable and you should be able to take them with you.

  • Ability to search for bookmarks without any tags.

Definitely on the way - we have some work to do on our tag searching and this will be part of it.

  • Ability to search based only on the number of stars a bookmark has.

Under consideration, but likely.

  • Ability to set a bookmark to not have any stars. Helpful if you accidentally star a bookmark.

You can do this now by clicking slightly to the left of the first star. The star will lose its color when you are over the hotspot, and you can click at that point to set a zero star rating.

  • A mobile version of Ma.gnolia so that I can view my bookmarks, or a particular tag of bookmarks from my Blackberry/Mobile phone. It would also be cool to have a mobile page where I could upload a bookmark that I see when I am out and about.

A great suggestion with many possibilities. Until we figure out what we can do with mobile devices, check out http://mobilicio.us/www/ which has Ma.gnolia support.

  • Better formatting/layout options for group descriptions. Ability to have separate paragraphs, and character formatting would be cool. Perhaps just enable the use of HTML in the description.

Currently you can use simple HTML codes to format underlining, italics and bold text.

  • Firefox extension to allow a tool in the customized toolbar to add bookmarks

We'd love to have this, too, but for now are focussed on things that will benefit everyone. If an enterprising developer wants to show off, there are some great design ideas in this discussion http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/rants-n-raves/discussions/111

  • Allow for a "browse tags" view a la iTunes that would allow user to select one tag, then select another that has an intersection with that, and then another and so on (not unlike selecting genre, then artist, then album in iTunes' browse).

This is being considered as we look at better ways to navigate data. Part of our philosophy is that just because things intersect in the database, they aren't always useful. We want to see how we can best fit the value of tag intersection browsing into the current interface.

  • Import bookmarks from Yahoo! MyWeb

It's on the list - we want to expand support for importing and MyWeb will be part of that.

  • When I search for a word using the full text search I would like to be able to find that word, even if it is only part of another. For example, if I am searching for my UNDOtv bookmark, I would like to just type in undo and have the search find it. Today I have to type the term exactly to find it.

That's a tricky one, but we'll keep it in mind as we keep returning to search to find ways of making it work better. It's definitely one of the most important aspects of Ma.gnolia and we want to make it as effective as we can.

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