Chris Johnston

I thought I would post a little bit about two of the new web apps that I am a beta tester for:

• Ma.gnolia
• Newsvine

Ma.gnolia is a bookmarking site similar to del.icio.us. However, it does have some differences. The first being that it is an absolutely beautiful web app. The interface is just gorgeous. Unfortunately, it is still in Beta and they do not have an invite system. So you will have to sign up and hope that they pick you.

It is interesting with this site. At first, aside from the aesthetics, I wasn’t sure if I liked it. It did not seem as usable as del.icio.us and once your bookmarks in the site it is definitely a little harder to get at them. However, the more time I spend with it, the more I like. The site seems a little more grown up and I love seeing the list of newly added bookmarks on the right hand side.

One thing that Ma.gnolia does different to del.icio.us is their groups. Any member can create a group. Once a group exists you can add bookmarks to it. I have a group for Java Frameworks in which I add links to any site that is about a Java framework—Hibernate, Spring, Lucene, Tapestry, Wicket, etc. Then, if other people are interested in the group they can add bookmarks as well.

Another think that I really like is the rating system. Every link can be rated out of 5. This allows me to see really quickly what people think are good links and which ones are bad. However, right now, every link seems to be rated fairly high.

It does have some problems though. The biggest is probably the search capabilities. The two biggest are that when you do a straight search, it only searches the title and the description fields for the bookmarks. It does not search based on tags. To find all the links for a tag, you have to click on the Tag menu option and then click on the tag. This seems like one to many clicks to me. The other problem is that there is no way to search on multiple tags. So if you wanted to find all the links tagged with both Java and Tutorial you can’t. You would have to search for Java and then manually look for Tutorial. However, according to an email, they are working on this.

The second site is Newsvine. It is a news site (big surprise there, eh?). Unlike digg.com where users submit stories, Newsvine pulls its stories from the major news providers like Rueters. The upside of this is that you are getting real news and there is lots of it.

I have only been using Newsvine for a little bit, so there is not much that I can say so far. I heard about it from Ambermac’s podcast, Inside the Net. If you want more information, download the podcast and listen to an interview with Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine.