Ma.gnolia Goes Mobile

My M.gnolia.com Bookmarks Ma.gnolia.com is a Del.icio.us clone which is to say that it’s a bookmarking site that encourages sharing of bookmarks. There are more similarities than differences between the two sites, both use tags to categorize bookmarks and bookmarks are public by default but can be flagged as private. The main differences I see is that Magnolia has a prettier, more Web 2.0’ish Ajaxy user interface.

Ma.gnolia has launched a mobile edition at m.gnolia.com. It allows you to view the most popular bookmarks from all users, your contacts bookmarks or your own bookmarks by tag.

Ma.gnolia has a bookmarklet for one click bookmarking from PC browsers which I’ve modified it to work with Opera Mini, Netfront and Internet Explorer Mobile. You can find it on the Yeswap Opera Mini Bookmarklets page at o.yeswap.com where there are also instructions on how to install bookmarlets on mobile browsers without having to type them in.

If you are a satisfied Del.icio.us user, I don’t see much reason to switch to ma.gnolia for the mobile site. While Del.icio.us doesn’t have a mobile edition, their HTML feeds work great on mobiles. There is no setup required to create or use an html feed. It’s just a url, here are some examples:

To see the latest 12 bookmarks posted on del.icio.us by user Wapreview (that’s me) use: http://del.icio.us/html/wapreview/

To show more or less than 12 on a page, add a count parameter
http://del.icio.us/html/wapreview/?count=20

To see my latest bookmarks tagged “wapsite” use:
http://del.icio.us/html/wapreview/wapsite/?count=20

It’s good to see that Magnolia is thinking of mobile but I do see one problem with using M.gnolia.com on most phones. When you click on a link in mobile M.gnolia it opens the target site directly, there is no transcoding of non-mobile content. This is fine, preferable actually, if you are using a full web browser like Opera Mini, Webkit, NetFront, Opera Mobile or Internet Explorer Mobile. Unfortunately, 90% of mobile web users have to make do with the crumby browsers that come pre-installed on phones and which can’t load the majority of sites bookmarked on Ma.gnolia. There really should to be an option to transcode external sites when using m.gnolia. Magnolia doesn’t need to write a transcoder, they should just partner with Mowser, Skweezer or Google. Russ and Mike at Mowser, in particular seem to be encouraging this sort of thing and sharing revenue even!

m.gnolia.com: (xhtml-mp ) Content: **** Usability: XXX

Related: BookMarking – Wap Review Mobile Site Directory