Social bookmarking site Magnolia, which suffered an extensive data loss last week, has posted a new update that says attempts at restoring user data have been unsuccessful. The site continues to be offline while repairs are made--a process Magnolia founder Larry Haff tells us is still ongoing.
Since last week he's been in touch with a handful of other services that might be able to do something with the data that's left. One of those places is Diigo, where Haff is encouraging users to begin a "new collection."
Haff is also pointing users toward tools that, for some, will let them grab a portion of their bookmarks for safe keeping. Magnolia users who are also using FriendFeed can pull in previously bookmarked pages using an officially sanctioned tool that crawls that RSS feed and spits out a stream of bookmarks. However, the tool does not pull in tags or descriptions that were created by users. It also will only go so far back as to when the user had signed up with FriendFeed, a service which is a little over a year old.
A second option that's not nearly as automated as the FriendFeed tool, but can go back further is Web caching. User pages that were picked up by Google and Archive.org can let users view their bookmarks pages and copy over links they had saved. These caches have the added benefit of the tags and descriptions--the two things the FriendFeed tool can't grab. Missing, however, is the option to take the cache and turn it into a quick RSS feed, which would make it simpler to import into another service.
Another side effect of the outage is that paying premium members of the service are being refunded their money in the next two weeks. The two levels of premium membership, which cost $8 and $25 a year respectively, removed ads from Magnolia's bookmark pages and groups. Assuming the site comes back if the data is eventually restored, users might be able to sign up for the service yet again.
Hot on the heels of launching its Web news-tracking service Political Streams, the Live Labs team at Microsoft has released a tool called Thumbtack. Similar to Listas, a previous Microsoft Live Labs project, Thumbtack lets users grab chunks of information from Web pages and store it in the cloud.
These chunks of information can be tagged and strewn about canvas pages as self contained ecosystems of content. Users can go in to edit them at any time and invite others to view their work. There is, however, no real-time collaboration, meaning that your collection can be shared, but not worked on at the same time.
With Thumbtack, Microsoft seems to have learned that not everyone uses Internet Explorer. To that end, the company now provides a bookmarklet that lets users grab Web content, marking a step forward from Listas' use of an installed toolbar. It gives users the option to tag and preview content before sending it to Microsoft's servers.
The big caveat is that there's no support for Google's Chrome browser and minimal support for Firefox. Mozilla users miss out on the special IE-only canvas view mode, which lets them maneuver their notes around a virtual workspace. Non-IE users are also unable to use the copy function, which lets them temporarily put an entire Thumbtack stack in their clipboard before pasting it into another collection.
Users are given an unlimited amount of storage, which is something that might change, once the service leaves its "technology preview" status. The application handles full-resolution photos from the Web, and Microsoft says video compatibility is coming in a later version.
I worry that Microsoft is introducing Thumbtack at a bad time. There are already a handful of Web social-clipping services that I think do this with far more ease for the end user. More notably Evernote and FriendFeed, both of which have much more intuitive bookmarklets and simpler organizational methods. Worse yet, this isn't taking advantage of Microsoft's existing, and recently revamped, Live services, which lets users store their stuff and interact with each other. This is simply giving them yet another bucket in which to store information.
To Microsoft's credit, moving away from requiring Internet Explorer to really make use of one of its services is a step forward, albeit with removal of two of its most helpful elements--the canvas view, and copy and paste.
If you're curious, here's an overview of how it works:
Magnolia's Larry Halff (right) and Citizen Agency's Tara Hunt announce plans to open up the social-bookmarking service in the coming months. To see the whole presentation click the credit link below.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Daniel Terdiman)On Friday social-bookmarking service Magnolia announced plans to open up its source code to let anyone add its bookmarking functionality to their site or private organization.
To cut through some of the tech talk it's akin to WordPress.com offering WordPress.org, a downloadable version that can be hosted on the user's own servers . More importantly, the project should help speed up the development of both the hosted and user-installed iterations of the service by tapping into a community of avid developers.
Some of the things to look forward to in this next version include:
- A new stream view that shows you the freshest bookmarks of people you're friends with on one single page.
- Support for both OAuth and OpenID, with the latter making it easier for people to sign into hosted builds of Magnolia.
- Sidebar customization
- Theming
The open-source version won't be available to developers until sometime in September, with a beta version (read: consumer friendly) on track for December and into the first part of 2009. In the meantime, if you're a developer looking to get your mitts on the code it will be made available here.
In an era of aggregators, YokWay is a very pretty sharing service. Much like Delicious or FriendFeed, the idea is to discover new content based on what other people are sharing. YokWay's appeal is much like that of Digg, with popular stories hitting the front page and getting rated and commented on by other users.
User-submitted content is split up into different buckets, with books, music, videos, and photos. There's also a restaurants category that turns the service into something like Yelp, where users can microblog about their culinary experiences. To aid in that, each story is geo-tagged, letting you see where it's coming from right on a Google map.
There are several ways to populate the site with content. You can record a video using Seesmic, or simply write in some text. Pulling up an item like a book or movie that you've seen uses Amazon.com and Yelp's directory, so other users will be able to click on it and buy it right away, which is part of YokWay's business model.
If you want to band together and populate your news to a specific channel, YokWay has interest groups called "circles" that you can subscribe to or create your own. Oddly enough, these cannot be privatized to keep random YokWay users from joining, which is a real shame if you're trying to use it as a link-sharing tool in a small team. For that, Delicious or FriendFeed offer a might tighter closed gate approach.
Ultimately, YokWay came off to me as a less compelling experience than FriendFeed or Delicious if only for the lack of people using it and tie-ins with other services. As a link-sharing service among friends it's very streamlined, but with no private rooms, mobile application, or bustling front page with high story turnover I'm left wanting more.
YokWay is currently in private beta. You can sign up here.
YokWay lets you create, join, and monitor interest groups of shared content. In this case you can scope out photography shares from around the world and view them on a map.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
It's gossip no more: as rumored, Germany-based social-bookmarking site Mister Wong has acquired the social-media feed aggregator Lifestream.fm for an undisclosed amount. The news was originally reported on digital-media blog Mashable.
Mister Wong previously acquired Websnapr and Pixer.us, which were both created by Lifestream.fm founder Juan Xavier Larea.
Technology from Lifestream will likely be integrated into Mister Wong user profiles so that members can pull in feeds from their social-networking accounts across the Web.
"Mister Wong is 100 percent based on RSS, and we thought that (Lifestream) is a great extension for our user profiles, for example," Mister Wong spokesman Christian Clawien said in a Wednesday interview with CNET News.com. "With Lifestream, we have the possibility to integrate even more digital activities around these bookmarks, so this could be a very interesting combination."
For Mister Wong, which Clawien said has greater reach in Germany than Yahoo-owned bookmarking giant Delicious, this was also a way to get a stake in the trendy "lifestreaming" market. "We've done this acquisition very quickly, because in Germany, other sites emerging at the moment also take part in this field of 'lifestreaming' features," Clawien explained.
We're big fans of the ShareThis button here at Webware. It's tiny and speedy when it comes to bookmarking or passing along interesting content you find on the Web to others. However, one thing it doesn't offer is a way to skin it to match your site. Enter Siphs, an unfortunately named, but useful tool for blog or site owners to help their users share and bookmark content while keeping tabs on what's getting the most play.
Siphs does everything ShareThis does including the option to brand the sharing page to match your blog or Web site. As well as a metrics service to let you track which services users are clicking, and see detailed numbers of shares for each. Compared with ShareThis, it's not nearly as seamless, since it jumps users to an offsite page full of sharing links, but it still manages to get the job done effectively.
Track what services people are using to share your content with Siphs.
(Credit: Siphs, LLC)Siphs has four levels of service, a free personal version, and three paid iterations that run off an annual subscription and offer template customization, click statistics, and an increased volume in the number of e-mails your users can send to share your content. The premium service also offers site owners leads on who's clicking the links in the e-mails in case you feel like wooing them over to your site with the integrated address book.
I've embedded the Siphs button (without branding) below. Feel free to try it out.
Update: This post has been amended to fix the erroneous statement that ShareThis doesn't offer metrics tracking or branding options (which it does).
Sick of installing bookmarklets or browser plug-ins to save and share links with other people? Want to simply want to keep a record of all the text, links, or pictures copied to a computer's clipboard? Then check out ControlC. ControlC is a new service that's halfway between a social bookmarking tool, and an archive utility.
Mac, Linux, and PC users can install this small application that will keep a record of their computer's clipboard content and automatically upload it to a feed. Uploaded items remain private until the user manually "unlocks" them for public viewing. Other users can then befriend one another and keep an eye on each others feeds, as they would messages on microblogging services, such as Twitter.
The service is free to use, but after five days older clipboard items are hidden. For $20, buyers get six months of access to the history, along with the option to import and export the data, get first dibs on upgraded software, and access to the customer support forums.
There are several other (local) software-based clipboard archiving and productivity applications, which can be found on CNET Download.com (here's a sample search). I would like to see ControlC add some of multiclipboard management options that makes tools such as M8 and Real Clipboard so useful for power users who like to keep a lot of items in a temporary cache.
Note: ControlC is in private beta, but register using code "beta4040" on this page until 11:59 PM PST tonight to test the service.
[via TechCrunch]
Keep an eye on your clipboard items, or those captured from other folks using ControlC. The service uses a small application that's almost like spyware to log clipboard items and upload them to ControlC's servers.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Yesterday Clipmarks added a new feature called ClipCasting. Like the name would suggest, it's a way to syndicate whatever content you've bookmarked using the proprietary Clipmarks toolbar. In this case, Clipmarks has opened up its service beyond just letting users link to bits of bookmarked Web material, and putting everything in a small widgetized container that can be added to blogs and social networking profiles. Readers can quickly jump back and forth through stories and note individual clips they like, or favorite the entire thing. Incidentally, the previous iteration of the site, which created a separate page for each piece of bookmarked content, is now called "classic view," with the ClipCast pages taking the spotlight.
ClipCasts are basically the content you'd find on a usual Clipmarks page wrapped up into a tiny widget that changes with whatever content you're bookmarking.
(Credit: CNET Networks)To supplement the embeddable version of the widget, there's a new Facebook app that accomplishes the same thing, albeit with less installation work on the part of the user. It'll denote any new piece of content that's been added to the ClipCast in the user's new minifeed for others to see. Likewise, if your friends have the app installed, you'll be able to keep track of whatever bits of content they've bookmarked. Compared with Facebook's standard sharing feature, ClipCast is better in that you can view the content right in the widget without having to venture off the site. It's also nice because your friends don't need to install the app to see the items you've shared.
As a content creator, services like Clipmarks are a mixed blessing. It's a super simple way to share stories with other people, but at the same time it takes potential visitors away from the original article, and moves the power to pick out what bits of content are published away from the original author. I still think Clipmarks has done a great job with ClipCasting. On the surface, it's a lot more approachable than some other bookmarking services that rely on text links alone.
We originally checked out Clipmarks back in late February. Since then, it got snatched up by Forbes Media, which noted that many of its editors had been using the service internally as a way to track and share Web content. Also worth looking at is eSnips, which has a toolbar that lets you grab and share page clippings, along with Yoono (review) and Diigo (review).
I've embedded a ClipCast:
... Read more
Forbes Media announced Wednesday that it has officially acquired Clipmarks.com, a social news site that operates by enabling members to "clip" and share parts of Web sites rather than simply bookmarking them. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Clipmarks CEO Eric Goldstein will stay in his post.
The acquisition will serve primarily to enhance Forbes' online news content, apparently. "Forbes.com editors use Clipmarks technology across the Forbes.com site, clipping and posting content from other Web sites that they think site users might be interested in reading," a release from the site explained.
The Clipmarks-Forbes rumor first surfaced way back in August but dissipated quickly when Clipmarks execs hastily denied that the deal was far from certain. It was never stated explicitly, but the undercurrents of Clipmarks' representatives responses suggested that the premature leak of the acquisition talks may actually have delayed or even halted the deal.
Hooeey is a new bookmarking and tracking service for your browsing habits. You install a small toolbar in your browser, and it will quietly keep tabs on all your tabs, including which sites you're going to, how long you're staying at each one, and when you're doing it. At the same time, Hooeey adds a social networking layer, letting you share specific sites with others, both on the Hooeey network, and other, larger social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us and Reddit. The goal is to let you centralize your favorites, and make them easier to share with others, while combining some facets of other free tracking services like Google Web History to let you see which services you're visiting the most.
If this entire concept sounds familiar, there's also the now defunct Atten.TV, which recorded people's Web browsing as it happened, so it could be shared with others. An idea we thought was a little too invasive, and apparently users did, too.
So why would you install something like this? The idea behind Hooeey is combining what is usually two separate services into one. The actual tracking function is likely already done in your browser, but in this case is better equated to Google Web History, because your history is stored online instead of your local browser installation. Hooeey also has another leg up on your browser's history file because it works with both platforms, meaning if you're using Internet Explorer and Firefox, your history from both browsers will be recorded in the same space.
Keep an eye on all your activity and tag every place you've gone for easy categorization later.
(Credit: Hooeey.com)To help you track all this data, Hooeey has a built-in analytics service which will break down your browsing habits with all sorts of handy charts and graphs. You can then go in and hand pick whatever sites you want for tagging and sharing. Maybe the most interesting feature to come out of this is the WebTour, which takes your hand-picked links and turns them into slide shows of your links. You can annotate each and rearrange each site's order, as well as theme it with a background feed. The concept is a lot like Diigo's recently launched Webslides feature, although a little less feature-rich.
I'm both fascinated and terrified of this idea, as I'm already pretty freaked out by some of the tracking initiatives popping up on the Web, including YouTube's now watching and public history features. The good news about Hooeey is that there's a decent amount of work involved in setting it up, yet it's really simple to toggle the tracking feature on and off. If you're a Google Web History user looking for a little bit more versatility with your data, Hooeey is definitely worth a look. Considering you can use both services at the same time, it might make for an interesting head-to-head after a month of use.
