H3RALD - Tag 'web20' (Atom Feed)

JournoTwit - The best way to organize your tweets

2009-11-05T15:19:17Z

Since I started using Twitter on a regular basis, I felt overwhelmed by the endless stream of data generated by the people I was following.

The official Twitter page quickly became inadequate to manage my tweets, so I began to search for an alternative through the myriad of Twitter clients available out there, both web and desktop based. After trying out a few desktop clients, I decided to restrict the search to web clients only: between work and home, I may use up to 4 different computers and 3 different operating system, and I really didn’t fancy the idea of keeping the same client up-to-date everywhere — even if such client existed.

Over the past months I tried dozens of different web-based Twitter clients, and narrowed the list of must-have features to the following:

The interface should be simple to use and not too cluttered.
I should be able to categorize tweets in columns (à la TweetDeck).
I should be able to know, when visiting the site, how many new tweets I have to go through.
I should be able to mark tweets as read.
It should display media files (at least pictures) inline with the tweets.
The interface should provide all the most common twitter actions like reply, retweet, follow/unfollow, shorten url, upload pictures etc. etc.

The good news is that I found at least one web-based client able to do all this: JournoTwit.

Introducing JournoTwit

JournoTwit was born – as many software projects – to scratch an itch:

Probably the last thing anyone was expecting me to do — even myself, was to create my own twitter client. However, I’ve been a little fed up with not having the features I wanted and running 5 or 6 accounts, I was getting annoyed at using several different applications just to have them logged in concurrently. […] In under 24 hours I put together a twitter client that functioned enough for me to call it my one and only. A few more days and I added in enough features that I felt it was good enough for public consumption. It is however, not perfect and I have plenty of improvements on my to do list for it.

JournoTwit’s introductory post by Andrew Spode Miller (@spode)

After months of public consumption, JournoTwit became a feature-packed Twitter client able to compete with a lot of mainstream alternatives – albeit remaining always relatively unknown to the masses. You can call it a niche Twitter client, able to satisfy a few basic needs:

The ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts at once.
The ability to categorize all incoming tweets automatically, according to the type of information within them.
The ability to keep track of unread tweets.

These three features alone were enough to make JournoTwit my one and only Twitter client. And no, it’s not only for journalists and writers.

Interface overview

After logging in, JournoTwit looks like this:

Note: I am using the edge version of JournoTwit, a sort of development snapshot with the latest features.

At the top, some more-or-less intuitive icons allow you to perform all the most common global actions:

Tweet
Manual refresh
Mark all columns as read
Add new columns
Quick search
Edit settings
Logout

Next to this global toolbar, there’s a list of links, each corresponding to a column. Clicking a link toggles the visibility of the corresponding column.

In each column, tweets are displayed in different column according to their state:

Read
Unread
Selected

You can select one tweet at a time by clicking the + icon. This toggles the tweet-specific actions:

Reply
Send a direct message
Save as favorite
Retweet
Translate

Pretty intuitive and easy to use, so far.

Default columns

When you login, you’ll notice that all your tweets are not presented in the traditional, disorganized single-column stream layout. Instead, they are sorted automatically into different columns, according to their type:

My Feed: All the tweets you sent. By default, this column is minimized.
No-Mention: All tweets containing your username without the “@”, i.e. every time someone mentions you sneakily, without sending you a reply.
Messages: All the direct messages you sent and received.
Mentions: All the tweets containing your twitter username (with “@”), such as replies to your tweets.
Statuses: All the tweets posted by people you follow that do not contain any link or cannot be categorized through other columns.
News: All the tweets posted by people you follow containing links to articles or non-multimedia web pages.
Retweets: All the retweets posted by people you follow.
Visual: All the tweets posted by people you follow containing links to pictures or videos. Where possible, media is displayed inside the tweet.
Audio: Same as above, but for audio items.
Chatter: Attempts to collect all conversations involving you or people you follow.

Surprisingly, these default columns are enough to make your Twitter experience easier and more manageable, without configure a single setting. They’re obviously not perfect: some images are not resolved automatically, for example, but it works well otherwise.

Still this may not be enough for your needs or maybe simply not the right thing. No problem: JournoTwit is extremely flexible when it comes to organizing and sorting out your tweets.

Adding new columns

All columns except for Mentions and Messages can be modified as you see fit. These two columns cannot be modified simply because there’s nothing you need to modify it, if you think about it. But they can be deleted, of course (and re-created in a blink, if you delete them by mistake).

Let’s go through the slightly geeky process of creating a column.

When you click the Add New Columns icon on the top-left corner you’ll be prompted to further clarify whether you want to add a…

Set of Columns: i.e. the default columns provided by journotwit or a single column containing all the tweets. Useful if you mess things up and you want to start over again.
Preset Column: choose from many different columns according to your needs, from different tweet types to memes (#followfriday, #musicmonday, etc.).
Custom Column: create your own personal column, according to your specific needs.

Because the overwhelming majority of my readers is composed by geeks, I’ll just describe how to create a custom column, so that you can fully understand the power of this tool, in the right hands.

Adding a custom column

The creation of a custom column doesn’t take long, but there are quite a few things you can configure. First off, you have to specify whether you want the column to collect local or global tweets: local means the people you follow, while global means everyone on the planet. Simple enough.

Then comes the juicy geeky part: search terms and tags. Simply type a valid Twitter Search query in the textbox, so something like this:

from:jonobacon OR #ubuntu -jaunty

…will hopefully fetch all tweets posted by @jonobacon or tweets about Ubuntu, but not related to the Jaunty Jackalope release. You can also add more text box and thus perform more search queries within the same column.

Then you can filter by tweet type, enabling or disabling Statuses, Visual, Links, Audio, ReTweets and Chatter. Useful to remove the noise (if you follow @brentspiner, make sure you disable ReTweets…).

Finally, you only have to configure a few more settings:

Whether you want to be alerted with a beep when there are new tweets in this column.
Whether you want the column to display tweets, a tag cloud or even an image slideshow.
The name of the column.

That’s all. Simple enough. As a side note, the “No-Mention” column is nothing but a custom column in disguise: if you try to edit it, you’ll see it’s nothing but a search for “username -@username -from:username”.

Other features and advanced settings

For the tweakers, JournoTwit also exposes the a set of global settings you can modify to enhance your experience or disable annoying behaviors (depends how you look at it):

Behavior

Unhide column when new tweets arrive? (default: yes)
Hide columns on Mark as Read? (default: yes)
Play alert sounds? (default: yes)
Animate when new items arrive? (default: yes)
Default #hashtags and search bar to a local search? (default: no)
Ignore Tag Coulds when marking all as read? (default: yes)
Ignore Slide Shows when marking all as read? (default: yes)
Warn when deleting columns? (default: yes)
Automatically translate tweets using Google Translate? (default: no)
Show “Did You Know?” messages on refresh? (default: yes)
Slide show transition time(s) (default: 5)

Display Adjustment

If you are unsatisfied by JournoTwit’s default look and feel, you can change the fond size, the color theme (there are 18 possible choices) and even match the color of the icons with the current theme.

Black Listing

Straight from the contextual help:

“Here you globally black list a #hashtag, such as #microsoft, or a search phrase such as “Windows 7”. Remember to separate them with a space and that you can block on a per column basis too."

This is just what you need when you want to filter out pointless tweets. Use with care though!

Conclusion

Maybe it’s just me being a geek, but I think JournoTwit nailed it when it comes to making Twitter more productive: everything just works, and fast, unlike some of its more feature-boasting competitors. I have been using it on a daily basis for weeks, and I’ve never missed a single tweet since (unless I explicitly wanted to do so).

That being said, there are a few small features I’d like to see:

I’d like to be able to mark single tweets, not entire columns, as read. In this way, when I go on vacation and come back, I can catch up with unread tweets more gradually, like I do with Google Reader.
I’d like to use shortcut keys to navigate the interface, like with Google Reader.
I’d like to configure tweets so that they only show up in one column, not in more than one (for example in Chatter, My Feed, and Mentions at the same time).
Support for Twitter Lists…

I already told @spode about some of these, and he said he’ll look into it, we’ll see what happens. Anyhow, just give it a try, and see if you like it!

Simply on Rails - Part 1: Concepts and Bubbles

2007-07-07T05:43:00Z

The first thing I do when I start developing a new application is write down some ideas.

Pen and paper normally do the job, but nowadays there are some valid online and offline applications which work as good if not (probably) better.

I’ve never been a fan of Mind Mapping. I’ve been to a seminar on problem solving and creativity and they were showing how mind mapping can unleash your creativity, but it didn’t really work for me. I found the concept-idea-concept-idea sequences a bit too restrictive for my liking.

So I decided to try something different: bubbles! Bubbl.us is an interesting online flash application which lets you create bubbles. You can create bubbles and relationships between them, change their color, their dimensions etc. And above all it’s absolutely fun to use. I created two bubble sheets, the first one to define how content will be organized in the next version of ItalySimply:

The diagram identifies three main types of content:

Houses – basically what the site is about: house listing with information and pictures about houses for sale or rent.
Links – Either swapped with partners or suggested by users.
Pages – Static content.

which will be organized in three different ways:

Tags
Categories
An internal search engine, allowing people to filter houses according to some criteria.

The other sheet focuses on relationships between content and users.

At the far sides we have users and administrators, and in the middle how they interact between themselves or with content, in particular:

Users will be able to access house feeds and be notified automatically of new additions
Users will be able to ask questions or comments to each house (they’ll be moderated, of course).
Users will be able to suggest links, or contact administrators using a “House Preferences” form or a more generic contact form.

Bubbles are fun, but while I was creating these two diagrams, I felt I absolutely needed to name the relationships between each entity or concept, so I spend some time trying to find a tool who would let me do so in an easy and fast way.

Yep, I needed to create a domain model to move a bit closer to create the database architecture of the site.
It turns out that this magic tool exists, and it’s free for non-commercial use: CmapTools.
It’s not web based, and it’s a 59MB Java desktop application which can be used to create Concept Maps.

Within minutes I was able to create a simple but pretty and functional enough domain model for my site:

Basically all the concepts I used are going to become models, and all the named relationships will become model associations in Rails.

Next step: database architecture.

Simply on Rails?

2007-06-30T04:00:00Z

So finally my site is back up, I don’t have to worry about coding anymore: just writing about whatever I like, no more Cake, no more MVC, no more frameworks…

What do you mean no coding anymore? You’ve been bragging about how this Rails thing is fast, how you can develop things easily, and this, and that… You know what you have to do now

^{^} That was my fiancée, actually, and she’s right: my web development days are far from being over, actually. I admit I tried to get away from it, but she kindly reminded me (and she can be very persuasive) that now I have to fix ItalySimply, the site I created a while a go (4 years?) with a mixture of Mambo (the CMS, now Joomla) and spaghetti PHP.

A sort-of-real-estate thingie visited by people who want to move to Italy or simply buy a house here. And it’s due a makeover, to be honest.

How am I gonna manage this? Let’s see…

COW

COW \- Code On Week-ends. my web development methodology: simple, effective, basically my only choice. Actually the full name is COW (IYL): Code On Week-ends If You’re Lucky, i.e.: if we’re not going out, if there’s nothing better to do, if I feel like it. No deadlines (almost), no plans to follow, nothing.

No, I’m not terribly motivated to take on this project, but I already thought about two things to get me going:

Get Agile Web Development with Rails \- I read bits of the first edition, and that’s what got me started with Rails, now it’s time to buy the real thing.
Blog about it \- I’ll try to keep a diary of my coding efforts and share the most juicy bits with the rest of the world. In this way I’ll also have content for my site and the three people who read this blog will have something (hopefully) interested to read.

The Cunning Plan

Instead of getting out of troubles by simply tidying up some PHP code or migrate the site to Joomla, I’d like to re-code the whole thing from scratch using Rails. Ideally I’d like to migrate quite a bit of the content (including the hundreds of houses with pictures which were published over the years), but at the moment I’m not thinking about it: after all, in the end the site will be so addictive and easy to use that adding hundreds of houses back on will be just so much fun! Right? Yeah, right…

First of all I’ll spend quite a bit of time planning the application and what has to be done, then I’ll have to practice a little bit with Rails, and then, eventually, I’ll end up writing some code. Of course, suggestions and ideas will be more than welcome throughout all the process.

Let’s see how it goes…

Why I like Netvibes

2006-09-18T03:51:00Z

The so-called “AJAX Start Pages” are not a new concept anymore, and like for almost any other offspring of Web 2.0 there is more than one to chose from. Hence the increasing number of comparative reviews on the Web nowadays (Yes, I’m guilty of that too). I soon learnt that for any “good and useful thing” on the web there are at least n clones: consider for example social bookmarking, community-powered news sites, php frameworks…
And no, you can’t use the word clone because it has a strong negative connotation nowadays so let’s just say that whenever someone comes up with a new idea, others examine it, process it and in a few weeks (days?) some very, very similar application comes out, and it’s better than the previous one.
Now, I don’t know exactly whether NetVibes was one of the first AJAX Start Pages created or not, but at any rate – in my very, very, very humble opinion, is the most advanced and the most usable of the lot, and an essential tool for lazy folks like me who want to keep up-to-date with what’s going on without having to visit dozen of websites everyday.

I can see people jumping up and down shouting “Pageflakes is better”, “Protopage kicks a$$” etc. etc. Well, yes, probably, as you like: different people like different things, and when it comes to AJAX Start Pages there’s really a lot to choose from: 3spots has an excellent (and complete, I believe) list of all the start pages currently available on the Net, so yes, you can try them out yourself and make out your mind :)

I made up my mind long ago after experimenting a few of those. Why Netvibes? OK, let’s see:

Fast to load: Netvibes is fast. Relatively fast, of course, for sure is not as fast as a plain, old-style html page, but I think it’s perhaps one of the fastest AJAX start pages ever created. As they pointed out, with a 15 million investment performance can only get better…
Tabbed pages: After tabbed browsing, tabs within a single page seem to gain popularity. Netvibes allows you to create more than one page to prevent cluttering and general chaos: you can create a tab for CakePHP feeds, one for some cute AJAX widgets you’ll never use, another for al that Web 2.0 rubbish you’ll never read — that’s what I do at least.
Smart Google Module: Finally Netvibes has a proper Google search module, which enable users to search with Google and view results on Netvibes instead of opening up a browser tab.
RSS done right: Their RSS reader is nice: by clicking on a feed title it opens up a virtual window inside the page with the whole story and a menu with links to the other stories included in the feed. This is the most convenient way to read whole articles like TechCrunch’s ones without leaving the page (and without loading the heavy TechCrunch UI).
Public API for modules: For those who – unlike me – has some proper free time and would like to develop their own module, the Netvibes Mini Module API is public…
Ecosystem : Netvibes Ecosystem includes hundreds of modules and podcasts and thousands of feeds and tabs which can be integrated into any Netvibes page with a single click. Some of my favourites: XE Currency Converter, Quick Translator, Google Map Daily Cartoons and Bitty Browser.
CakePHP feeds? Loads!

Enough?

Google Apps for your domain: a shared hosting killer service?

2006-08-28T03:51:00Z

A while ago Google started offering services like Google Mail (Gmail) and Google Calendar to domain owners. Sure everyone likes Gmail, but one of the few bad things about it is that it never feels “unique”: your email address is always gonna be gmail.com or googlemail.com. Not a big deal? Well, sure, not really, but it really depends on the people using the service and how fussy they are:

small/medium business wouldn’t like this: @gmail.com gives farless credibility than @domain.com
When using Gmail with the Send As feature, messages will be sent “on behalf of”, and this can potentially mess things up as some spam filters don’t like it.

Now it seems to be official: Google is starting to offer customizable services to anyone who wish to sign up for it, not only as a restricted beta service.
What does this mean? Well, it can be the (free and easy) definitive web solution for small business, kids, grandmas and everyone who wants to establish a presence on the web by paying only the annual domain renewal fees…

Included applications

Note the title: Google Apps for your domain, not only Gmail. Here’s what you get:

Gmail – You know what it offers: a state-of-the art AJAX interface, speed, reliability, very effective spam filter, loads of space, tagging (labels) stars and all the rest.
Google Calendar – One of the best online calendar available. Features and AJAX interface, full integration with Gmail, ability to create private and public calendars, reminders,
Google Chat – Google’s instant messenger, available through Google Talk desktop application or online, seamlessly integrated in your Gmail interface.
Google Web Pages – aka Google’s page creator, easily create webpages using Google’s WYSIWYG online editor.

Now, try imagining these four services combined and (almost) fully customizable… Still no idea? Well, keep reading for a list of all the included features.

Included Features

In order to use Google Apps for your domain, you must of course own a domain. The next step involves changing your domain’s MX entry to “ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM”, and follow the instructions to create an administration account for your Google applications, and after a while every email sent to your domain’s accounts will be routed to your new Google-powered inbox. Similarly, in order to use Google Page Creator on your domain, you’re required to change the CNAME record of your DNS to “ghs.google.com”.

Note: in order to avoid inconveniences especially if a lot of users use your domain’s email, it is recommended that you pay attention on Google’s instructions on how to set the whole thing up. For further information refer to the official FAQ. In order to be able to use Google Page Creator on your domain, you must setup an URL to publish your webpages: of course do NOT set this to “www.yourdomain.com” or any subdomain currently in use or your visitors will access the pages you created with Google Page Creator.

Here’s what you get:

For a bigger image click here. Let’s now have a look at what are the main differences from the standard Gmail.

Include your own logo

Your own logo will be displayed on the upper left corner of every page. And this is truly sweet. All you have to do to change it is uploading a 143×59 PNG or GIF image from your domain management panel (see below).

Use your company name instead of Google’s

Besides a custom logo, it is possible to set a company name to be used instead of “Google” or “Gmail” in page titles and links. I chose “H3RALD.com Mail” and that’s displayed everywhere, including on the sign-in page.

Control Panel
All the custom settings can easily be managed through an easy-to use control panel:

It’s really easy to use and has wizards to setup all the included services and options like setting up user accounts, settings etc.

User Accounts
Through the control panel you can add new users and modifying existing user accounts to access your services. You can create administrators who are able to access administrative domain-wide settings, and standard users. Every user gets 2048MB of space for their emails, and that’s pretty generous considering that it seems that you’re able to create around 25 user accounts.

Already have a list of users you’re like to import? Just save them in CSV format and upload them.

Would you like to be able to contact all your users at once, e.g. via a newsletter? Google thought about this as well, and you can create your own personal newsletters which can be sent out automatically to your @yourdomain.com email accounts.

Internal Messaging System
But there’s more. We all know Google Talk: yes it’s nice, but probably MSN has more features, smileys and all the rest but it still remains a perfectly usable instant manager, which also allows file transfer. Your users can use Google Talk to communicate with each other or simply chat through their webmail interface, More features? Well, for example you can setup Google Talk to work on federated networks.

Appointments/Projects management
Google Calendar is an excellent online calendar, and now you can use it within your own domain as well. This means, for example, that it can be used to set your company’s appointments, reminder, project deadlines by creating an unlimited number of custom calendars to share with your collaborators.

Design your own site
I know a lot of restaurants, shops and people who would like to have a small site for their business or activity, but they can’t develop web application themselves. So the most obvious solution is to hire some professional web developer to rip them off… erhm, to create a website for them. Now it is not necessary: by setting the correct DNS parameters, you can allow users to create their own webpages using a foolproof and advanced web editor powered by Google: Google Page Creator.
I didn’t set it up on my own domain, but a preview of what you can do with Google Page Creator is available here.

Scenario

After considering all this, I came to the conclusion that what Google did can help a lot of people and at the same time prevent some evil webmaster to charge them hundreds of Euro (they really get away with it!) for basic “websites” with “three or more static pages”.
All you have to do is buy your own domain, and that can be as cheap as 8$ per year, the rest comes for free, from Google:

The best webmail interface you can possibly imagine
Nearly unlimited space for everything
A truly effective spam filter
About 25 fully-featured user account, possibly more if you ask nicely
Your own “corporate instant messenger”
Your own calendar to manage appointments, meetings etc.
An intuitive and advanced web page creator – not like Geocities

All this for free. Yes, with ads (I’m not here to discuss privacy concerns), but after all they’re not displayed on your main site.

What about Server Side technologies for my sites?

OK kid, now that would be a little bit too much, even if I can foresee some possible “Google Web Widgets” at some point. “Create your interactive and dinamic website within minutes, no programming knowledge required”… that would be great (for Google) and bad (for freelance web developers). One thing at a time, after all G(od|oogle) has the whole eternity to fulfill his Goals.

Review of ten popular social bookmarking services

2006-05-13T13:06:27Z

Social bookmarking¹ is perhaps one of the pillars of Web 2.0, allowing people to save, tag and share their Internet bookmarks online anytime, anywhere. Since del.icio.us² came out, the Web is not the same anymore: no more IE favourites or Firefox bookmarks, no more “Save page as…” etc., people nowadays want to do everything online without being bond to a single computer, and also make everything they do or read public – apparently. This is one of the key concepts of Web 2.0³: sharing information in a quick and easy way, without any restrictions.Del.icio.us was the first, but of course not the only one social bookmarking system which became popular in a few months: many other followed its example, many companies developed their own alternative to del.icio.us, adding and removing features, changing bits etc. etc. Result: someone said that “[…] There is almost 1 new social bookmark/digg like service appears one daily basis […]”⁴.

Nice, and there are also many reviews of each one as well⁵! Here’s another one…

Preliminary Notes: This round-up does not include all social bookmarking sites and yes, there are a lot missing. I decided to pick 10 services out of the dozens available for one simple reason: make this article more readable. I’m really sorry if your favourite social bookmarking site is not listed: if you feel creative you can add your (short!) review as a comment to this article.
Although I recently wrote a very positive review of Ma.gnolia⁶ and I know its lead developer, I do not consider myself partial towards Ma.gnolia, you’ll notice when I review it.

Common features and concepts

The social bookmarking sites reviewed in this article are: del.icio.us², Ma.gnolia⁷, Furl⁸, Spurl⁹, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0¹⁰ Blinklist¹¹, Smarking¹², Shadows¹³, Simpy¹⁴ and Blogmarks¹⁵.

All these social bookmarking sites have some features in common which can be used to define social bookmarking itself:

They allow users to save URLs online, adding some notes to it, and share them with others
Each url can be tagged with custom tags user can create and manage
RSS is widely supported, so you can included your “recent bookmarks” in your blog, for example
They allow users to import/export bookmarks in various formats
They support the creation and management of user profiles
Bookmarklet, buttons or other cute little things are provided to make your life easier and bookmark faster

Such features will not be mentioned over and over in each review, of course.

Review parameters

Besides an overview for each service and some notes regarding their intended audience, some other parameters will be considered and rated from 0 to 10 (the higher, the better):

Speed
I’m currently on dialup, and so I’ll be able to effectively test the speed and rendering time of each site. The higher the mark, the faster the site is.

Features
Notes concerning added/missing features, and overall features rating.

Simplicity
Do you need to be a certified geek™ in order to use the service or even your dog can learn how to use it, if he tries hard?

Interface/Design
This parameter concerns the visual appearance of a website. Note: it can be particularly subjective, I’ll try my best to be objective.

Userbase
Basically the amount of people which use a determined service.

Ready to go…

del.icio.us

Speed: 10 – This is by far the fastest site to load, perhaps because it doesn’t have any fancy eye-candy at all
Features: 6 – del.icio.us offers only the most essential features, nothing too fancy, but nothing too bad either
Simplicity: 6 – You need some time to get used to it, but it’s not confusing like some others. Hardly any documentation or tutorial provided, but hey, this is the geek’s choice after all
Interface/Design: 6 – Personally I like it, but I know I have no taste for design and interfaces. An average user would say that it’s too plain and no, nothing fancy at all
Userbase: 10 – Judging by the amount of people coming to my site after one of my article made it to digg, compared to other social bookmarking services, this is BY FAR the most used one. Everyone has a del.icio.us account, then, maybe, something else
Overall Rating: 7.6

Overview
This is THE social bookmarking service, it is the first, the most supported (every other service allows importing from del.icio.us), and the most used, with several thousands of registered users. Obviously, this made it the main term of comparison for other bookmarking services, which claim to be better because they are successful exactly where del.icio.us is lacking, e.g.:

Eye candy
they offer better user interaction (comments, messages)
Ratings are supported
More AJAX and effects
Other sites cache bookmarks internally or may offer thumbnails

Nevertheless, del.icio.us still remains the geek’s choice, the numbers speak by themselves. It is also my choice at the moment, because of its simplicity (in the sense of “no useless things are included”) and speed.

Suitable for: IT professionals, computer enthusiasts, tech-savvy people in general. Your old auntie probably won’t like it, but at least she’ll keep away from it and leave you in peace.

Ma.gnolia

Speed: 5 – It’s a bit slow if compared to competitors. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s the server, maybe it’s Ruby on Rails.
Features: 7 – Saved copies, AJAX 5-star ratings, AJAX private/public lock, groups & messages
Simplicity: 8 – Fairly simple to learn and use, excellent documentation online
Interface/Design: 10 – I really like Ma.gnolia’s website design over all the others: clean, simple and professional with AJAX features in the right place.
Userbase: 6 – It’s fairly new so not many people are using it. It’s being pushed by Zeldman & ALA’s crew though
Overall Rating: 7.2

Overview
This was my first choice and the first social bookmarking site I reviewed⁶ and tried properly. It is developed in Ruby on Rails and it excels in simplicity and visual appearance, but it has some rather annoying CONs. First of all it’s a bit slow for my liking, especially now that I’m on dialup. Second, the search is currently limited to tags only: it’s obviously a temporary thing and it will be back soon though, but I gave it a 7 instead of a 8 for features for this reason.
Ads are visible on the top of every page – subscribe (soon) to remove them… oh well.

Suitable for: Anyone, although it seems to be the choice of web designers and people involved in website development.

Furl

Speed: 7 – Fast enough, no complains and no unnecessary objects or images either.
Features: 6 – saved copies, plenty of tools including their own toolbar, multiple categories but no tagclouds and not as customizeable as the others
Simplicity: 7 – Simple, organized, essential. Documentation available.
Interface/Design: 5 – This is nothing fancy at all compared to the others, a fairly traditional web interface. Web 2.0? …Pardon?
Userbase: 8 – This is one of the oldest social bookmarking services and it’s easier than del.icio.us, that’s why the fairly large userbase.
Overall Rating: 6.6

Overview
When I tried this service after trying the others I wasn’t impressed at all. The interface is fairly standard, all done in a traditional way, no AJAX at all: if you absolutely hate Web 2.0 hype, even when it’s actually useful, go for this. To rate a bookmark I must click on edit and select the rating from a select menu: our children wouldn’t believe it.
The good thing about Furl, and what made it popular, presumably, is its simplicity over other similar services like del.icio.us, that’s the most logical reason I could find to explain its popularity.

Suitable for: Anyone, users against or not yet accustomed to Web 2.0 interactivity

Spurl

Speed: 8 – Fast and pleasant to look at, no complaints
Features: 7 – Saved copies, del.icio.us sync, useful stats, no ratings, multilingual, some quirks (see below)
Simplicity: 8 – Yes, this is really simple and straightforward to use. Extensive documentation available.
Interface/Design: 8 – A really clean, simple, but yet nice looking and organized interface.
Userbase: 6 – Fairly popular, not as popular as del.icio.us but on the right track
Overall Rating: 7.4

Overview
Now this is is an interesting service. The first thing that I really liked about it is the good del.icio.us integration: not excellent because it seems to take quite a bit to import my del.icio.us bookmarks, but everything you bookmark with Spurl can be send to del.icio.us at the same time and vice versa! They also offer interesting stats regarding your bookmarks, report broken links, cache webpages, etc.
Some annoying things must be noted though (hence the 7 in features): the bookmarklet will popup a window – not great; it doesn’t support ratings and the tag management could be improved: del.icio.us and ma.gnolia can suggest tags when saving a bookmarks, while Spurl unfortunately doesn’t. It also seems to be less tag-centric than the others (except for Furl of course). It is multi-language and offers a 18+ filter – but if you forget to mark a bookmark as “explicit” it won’t work, and as result you can get porn links on the homepage…

Suitable for: Anyone, del.icio.us users who would like to try something new without losing sync with their favourite service.

Yahoo MyWeb 2.0

Speed: 6 – Not too fast, like other sites in the Yahoo network.
Features: 5 – “Web 2.0”? Well, yes, it has tag clouds and allows bookmark sharing, but that’s about it.
Simplicity: 7 – Integrated with Yahoo services (and toolbar), fairly easy to use, if you don’t know something the FAQs are handy.
Interface/Design: 6 – Clean, simple and a bit boring – perhaps I’m just to used to the rest of the sites in the Yahoo network
Userbase: 8 – Grab some random users and a big chunk of Yahoo enthusiasts: not bad!
Overall Rating: 6.4

Overview
When I first read about it, I though: look, Yahoo is ready to embrace the Web 2.0 philosophy, then I tried it and changed my mind: it has tags, tag clouds, it allows sharing but nothing more than that. The interface is still Web 1.0, and AJAX methodologies are not used at all.
Basically this service grasps the basic concepts from del.icio.us & C., simplifies them and re-presents them in a form which can be easily understood by the majority of Internet users of the planet (and primarly Yahoo users) and yet look innovative. Excellent marketing work, perhaps, but nothing too new or particularly useful there.

Suitable for: Anyone, in particular Yahoo users for the excellent integration with the rest of Yahoo services.

Blinklist

Speed: 7 – Fast, especially considering the type of interface
Features: 10 – The service which offers more features than anyone else, simply that. Ratings, quit bookmarks, video tutorials, AJAX where needed, tabs, starred links, message board etc. etc.
Simplicity: 7 – Considering the amount of features it offers, it’s simple enough to use. Impressive Help section.
Interface/Design: 9 – I really like its interface, the scary amount of AJAX code it uses et al. Not a 10 because the five icons at the top (Gnome-like?) don’t go well with the rest of the design, only that.
Userbase: 7 – Not too popular, and new to the scene
Overall Rating: 8

Overview
This should technically be the winner. These guys truly did their best trying to build perhaps the most “Web 2.0 compliant” social bookmarking service ever. The downside of it is just the huge amount of AJAX involved in all this, but if you’re fine with that, Blinklist is truly amazing. It uses a digg-like approach to blink the urls which appear on the site instantly: an AJAX div fades in allowing you to fill in the bookmark’s details and then it fades away incrementing the blink count and adding it to your collection. The private area has a quadri-tabbed sidebar with: 1) real-time chat, 2) popular tags view, 3) recent tags used, 4) cloud view. It supports site thumbnails but not saved copies unfortunately, advanced profiles, avatars, ratings…
Advanced, “cool” and (perhaps too much) on the edge. In Italian we have a word for things like this, but I won’t mention it here. Just think about Fast and Furious, the feeling when browsing this site can be similar to driving an heavily modded car: if you like the way it works, it’s the best thing ever – if not, well, del.icio.us does the job alright.

Suitable for: Web 2.0 lovers, geeks, anyone brave enough to try it without getting too shocked

Smarking

Speed: 7 – Nothing superfluous in the interface, but it could be faster
Features: 8 – Proper messaging, advanced profiles, STATS!
Simplicity: 7 – Easy to learn and use, has a FAQ and a wiki
Interface/Design: 7 – Very traditional but functional interface. Not too fancy or advanced, but does the job
Userbase: 4 – About 300 users
Overall Rating: 6.8

Overview
Don’t expect anything too fancy from Smarking, but a few features caught my attention. For one, it supports a proper messaging system: other services allow you to send notes and a link to other users, while this one has a proper, built-in private messaging system… OK, not a big thing but nice to have. The design is not too great: it does the job but there’s hardly any image, nevermind AJAX effects or similar.
What really impressed me (hence the 8 in features), are the detailed stats that this service makes available publicly: detailed domain stats, tag stats, user stats and more while others simply don’t bother.
It was developed using Python and PostgreSQL by an Italian student of Computer Science – apparently there’s someone who is able to program properly in my country as well. Good job: nothing too exceptional as social bookmarking service, but an exemplary work.

Suitable for: Italians in particular and everybody else as well.

Shadows

Speed: 5 – I don’t know if it’s because of Rails or the interface, but this site doesn’s seem to perform as well as the others
Features: 7 – enhanced commenting, saved copies, thumbnails, groups
Simplicity: 6 – The usual FAQs are there, but other than that there’s no particular effort to make newbie’s life easier
Interface/Design: 5 – Simple but not quite pretty interface, no graphic effor whatsoever, AJAX for adding and editing comments
Userbase: 6 – Not a tiny userbase but not huge either
Overall Rating: 6

Overview
Maybe it’s just me, but I wasn’t too impressed by Shadows: it doesn’t offer any particular innovative feature other than enhanced commenting. You can start real discussions about your bookmarks and interact with other users fairly well, but the question is: do you really want to? Perhaps an interesting way to build communities, but other than that nothing special.
The interface is not too pretty, unlike Ma.gnolia it looks like they didn’t make a terrible effort trying to design something pleasant to look at and the final result is quite boring. They seem to support thumbnails, but clearly they use a third party service like Alexa because there’s hardly any thumbnail displayed, generally: wrong choice – see Blogmarks below for a better thumbnail support.
And yes, the default green smily default avatar is terribly cheesy and truly annoying (not that the others are any better…).

Suitable for: Anybody? Nobody? Maybe people who like a more community-like approach

Simpy

Speed: 7 – It’s fast, but again, its interface is not anything fancy
Features: 7 – Detects broken links and redirections, notes, groups
Simplicity: 6 – It has FAQs but it could look confusing for inexperienced users
Interface/Design: 6 – Nothing special, no eye candy, no AJAX even where it would be appreciated
Userbase: 7 – Medium-sized userbase
Overall Rating: 6.6

Overview
The best feature offered by Simpy is the link detection service, able to detect broken links, duplicates and redirections. Everything else looks pretty normal and nothing special: it offers tag management, groups, notes, the usual tools. Copies of your bookmarks are NOT cached, and clicking on the cached link will take you to web.archive.org, hoping that it cached the page you’re looking for (hell even I could do that!).
No AJAX, nothing too pretty. Boring? Well, no, let’s call it functional and essential.

Suitable for: Anybody, moderate experience required

Blogmarks

Speed: 5 – It’s slow. One of the main reasons ought to be the thumbnails: every bookmark has an associated image!
Features: 7 – Excellent thumbnail support, Private tags, usual things
Simplicity: 6 – It’s pretty straightforward, but there’s only one page to help new users
Interface/Design: 7 – Simple and essential, no AJAX, not too fancy
Userbase: 7 – One year old, medium userbase
Overall Rating: 6.4

Overview
Again, nothing too special – except, of course, that all bookmarks have a thumbnail: a good thing which made me feel popular for about 0.7 seconds when I noticed a little picture showing my own site when someone bookmarked it, but on the other hand quite annoying and pointless for dialup users.
No Web 2.0 interface, just plain old stuff which does the job but is not particularly pleasant or innovative. Private tags? A good thing maybe, and probably the only real innovation compared to other similar services.

Suitable for: Anybody, moderate experience required

Conclusions

Although del.icio.us is still the leading service for social bookmarking, its competitors are obviously getting better. Among the ones I reviewed today, at least some of them look promising: Blinklist is definitely the most advanced in terms of features offered and technology used, and I think I’ll try it out a bit more and see if it can be better than del.icio.us in the long run. Spurls is also tempting especially because it offers various interesting features without forcing you to abandon your del.icio.us account – and that was an excellent (and wise) feature Spurl developers chose to implement, without any doubt. Regarding my old favourite, Ma.gnolia, it still deserves a mention, mainly for being a succesful blend of latest technology and class design, without being too extreme.

So… what’s your favorite then?

Notes and Resources

¹ Social Bookmarking, Wikipedia Page

² del.icio.us, the first social bookmarking service

³ What is Web 2.0? – O’Reilly article

⁴ Mother of all social bookmarking services icons – A cool mosaic of all the social bookmarking sites’ icons.

⁵ Other reviews and comparisons of social bookmarking services:

Social bookmarking resources
Comparison charts of the most popular social bookmarking systems [PDF]
PCmag round-up of various social bookmarking sites
Social Bookmarking Tools (I) – A general review
ALL Social that CAN bookmark – The most comprehensive review of social bookmarking sites.

⁶ Ma.gnolia – Social bookmarking made (extremely) easy

⁷ Ma.gnolia – Social bookmarking service

⁸ Furl – Social bookmarking service

⁹ Spurl – Social bookmarking service

¹⁰ Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 – Social bookmarking service

¹¹ Blinklist – Social bookmarking service

¹² Smarking – Social bookmarking service

¹³ Shadows – Social bookmarking service

¹⁴ Simpy – Social bookmarking service

¹⁵ Blogmarks – Social bookmarking service

Digg Effect - the day after

2006-05-05T01:59:00Z

…So it turns out that my last article appeared on Digg homepage.
This was quite a pleasant surprise: I didn’t expect that an article submitted to my own site could make it that far! I thought you’d need a relatively well-known website, mafia’s support, some divine intervention and a terrific amount of luck, but it seems that sometimes an interesting article about an interesting subject can be enough. I’ll probably write a more detailed report of what happened soon, in another article rather than a blog post, but for now I just wanted to post a short summary here.

Two days ago I decided to write a roundup of the six Rails-inspired PHP frameworks, CakePHP, Symfony, PHP on Trax, Code Igniter, Biscuit and Pipeline. The reason for this was that I couldn’t find anything comparing all of them and such comparison could have been useful for some new bakers_. OK, I confess, when I started writing the article I thought I’d submit it to Digg and see what happens: I saw that another roundup made it to the first page and people were quoting it everywhere on the net. It’s a nice article, but – in my humble opinion – not too exhaustive.
Then I read a comment by someone to the digg of the latest Cake release stating:

Yes, they are similar – both were inspired by Rails, but Cake has gone further to differentiate themselves. Here’s a decent (but not great) overview of some frameworks: http://www.phpit.net/article/ten-different-php-frameworks/

At that point, I thought that another round up, perhaps more Cake-centric, was in order. The other reason was that in one of my recent blog posts I tried to compare CakePHP and Symfony, but obviously my emotions got in the way and in the end I noticed I was kinda attacking Symfony. That was a blog post though, and that’s half-allowed, but I felt that I should have written a slightly more objective article mentioning also all the other competitors.

Anyhow, right when I went to submit my article to Digg, it turns out that another guy wrote a similar round up, which made it to Digg’s homepage. That was an annoying cohincidence, but in the end things didn’t go too bad: his roundup was more generic, while mine was more specific and detailed.

After submitting my article the reaction wasn’t instantaneous… 5, 7, 10, 13 diggs in the first two hours. Then shortly I made it to 30 and when the 40th visitor dugg it my article was moved to the first page!
I immediately noticed it when I refreshed my stats page: a minute before my girlfriend was here telling me “oh look, over 400 visitors… not too bad”. Then I refreshed the page and it said 539, I refreshed again and said 600-something… eeep… Digg effect!

A special praise goes to my new hosting company, BlueHost: the server didn’t go down and it managed the extra traffic fine! A good test for CakePHP as well, since I built this site with it.

So here I am… over 5000 visitors read my article, about 600 people dugg it, nearly 40 people commented it on digg.com and 20 directly on my site. And – except for the usual Rails-is-better-than-anything-else comments – they were generally positive. Over 250 people bookmarked on del.icio.us and many blogs mentioned it in many different countries.

Money? Didn’t make much with adsense at all: programmers don’t click on ads!
Bandwidth? About 1GB was gone in the first five hours, now is obviously slowing down: oh well, I still have another 398GB available till the end of the month :P

Ma.gnolia - Social bookmarking made (extremely) easy

2006-03-04T12:53:33Z

Social Bookmarking[1] is not something new anymore; in fact, some people say they've seen too much of it already (imagine that!). One of the worst things - or best, depending on your point of view - of the whole Web 2.0[2] hype is that everything evolves at least ten times faster than it did in good ol' Web 1.0 (if you let me use the term): there are many, many more web pages created everyday by literally anyone, from web developers to total newcomers to the Web, to amateurs who just want to share their content because it's 'cool'.
However, this is not a rant. Web 2.0 is inevitably going to become more and more user friendly, and you can't do anything about it. Why? Because it pays. Who's most likely to click on the flashy banner on page X featuring product Y not knowing that by doing so company Z will get a penny: your grandmother who is just now learning how to use the Internet or your brother who's majoring in computer science?
However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. I strongly believe that the Internet becomes a much more user-friendly place everyday, and, to put it bluntly, the web developers and companies who understand this will become popular and make money.

I remember when I first read about social bookmarking: people were screaming here and there that you had to share your bookmarks on the Net, and this 'delicious'[3] thing was getting more and more popular. Then it became 'delirious'[4], and it was better, because it also meant free...then the shadows[5] came...
I was never a big fan of the whole concept, I admit, but an old friend of mine from a community[6] turned up and asked me to try a new website he coded in Rails[7]: a new social bookmarking service, simple to use and free: ma.gnolia[8].
I immediately felt the impulse to reply (as this happened on IRC[9])"i.dont.give.a.sh.**". I really didn't want to try yet another social bookmarking thing, as I had had enough of it even before I started to grasp the whole concept properly. Hoever, since the guy is a friend of mine whom I respect a lot, especially for his skills and knowledge, I decided to give ma.gnolia a try, and here's what happened.

A website which smells good
One of the things any Web 2.0 business cannot afford to overlook is the design and user interface of their product. It does matter! If you want to please your customers, make something that looks good. This is not a new idea at all[10], and it has been shown to work in many situations.
The first impression I had about the ma.gnolia website was similar to the one I had when visiting CSSZenGarden[11] for the first time: code is poetry. I particularly like the latest trend in web design, which preaches simplicity, functionality, clean-looking pages, xHMTL+CSS instead of other assorted bloat, pastel colors, rounded corners, and so on, and there are no rounded corners in ma.gnolia.
The ma.gnolia website succeeds in making the visitor feel comfortable: it doesn't clutter the page with pointless images or weird widgets, but limits itself to only the essential items needed for usability - logo, banner, essential navigation (bookmarks, tags, people, groups, messages, profile, support and tools), content, a few well placed and unobtrusive images and icons, and a footer with the same usual boring-but-necessary links (copyright, about, terms of service, privacy policy, contact us), nothing more. What else do you need?
People might disagree, of course, and it's certainly not the answer for all tastes: there are some people who really can't stand 'plain' websites, and they think that the whole philosophy is pointless: De gustibus non est disputandum (There is no accounting for taste). We had the same concerns two thousand years ago and the Romans got it right. Even the Romans would have agreed that ma.gnolia is easy to use, too plain or not.

Quick features overview
The obvious first step before starting to use ma.gnolia is signing up for a (free) account. Right? Wrong. For non-committers, or casual, let's-try-it-and-see-what-happens users there's a (free) trial account. You can start using fully functional ma.gnolia right away, but unless you register, nothing you do will be permanent. This seems to be a new Web 2.0 trend as well; before, you needed to make everything free to get people's attention, now it must be free and not require registration. Makes perfect sense.

Adding bookmarks
Trial or not, you can start adding bookmarks right away through the form on the front page, which is simple enough. As long as you didn't discover bookmarks (or favorites for the browser-impaired) the day before yesterday, you probably already have your little collection of bookmarks meticulously catalogued in many different folders. Well, you can import them into ma.gnolia in a few very easy steps, and that, believe me, will save time. Some people may think I'm wasting my time stating the obvious here, but when I tried del.icio.us the import feature wasn't available, and this was enough to make me walk away.

'Casual user', 'non-web-savvy', 'non-geeks': ma.gnolia obviously targets these types of people. Everything on the site is well-documented and easy to use. Ma.gnolia's project manager said in a recent interview[13]:

[...] The rest of us muddle along for about 30 seconds, and if we still don't get it and aren't enjoying the experience, we leave, never to return. To avoid that fate -- to make the complex simple -- our lead IA Tanya Rabourn put in the hours and the iterations needed to make Ma.gnolia comprehensible to the non- expert.

This makes sense to me: Web 2.0 seems to be more user friendly, simply because a lot of non-geeks are browsing the web everyday and clicking on adverts.

Once you import all your bookmarks, you'll have an almost exact copy of your bookmarks collection, now available online! If you don't want to share them, because you believe in anti-social bookmarking or you just want to have a backup, you can import all your bookmarks as "private", and you can toggle the status by clicking or , whenever you like: the magic of Ajax[14] will do the rest.
You can also rate your bookmarks from one to five stars, but only yours: ma.gnolia is not a pointless competition to be the one who links the most and best websites.

What if I want to delete a bookmark? Quick hint:

Yes, you can tag as much as you like
No, there are no folders. Forget it. For me it started with Gmail[15] and it was shocking enough: there are no folders, but you can tag your messages. This can be disorienting for some, but once you have overcome the initial trauma, you will realize that tags can be better than folders in some cases. At any rate, Web 2.0 uses tags everywhere, so you'd better get used to it. A tag is basically a virtual label you can put on something - here, a bookmark - to make it belong to a defined group. Tags normally don't have a hierarchy like folders, and each item can have more than one tag. Simple.

Unfortunately, you can't directly tag (or rate) bookmarks that you add from the main page, but since you'll normally be using some sort of bookmarklet for Ma.gnolia, it doesn't really matter. Also, at the moment, once you create a tag you can't rename it, but this feature will be added soon.

Connecting people
If you tried some other social bookmarking services before and you really enjoy the philosophy behind it, you'll be pleased to know that Ma.gnolia is even more social than others. When you register an account you can optionally disclose your real name, age, and gender, add an avatar, a webpage and so on, and you can create your own profile, just like anywhere else on the Internet.
Furthermore, Ma.gnolia allows groups: you can create, join, and leave a group of bookmarkers who share the same interests as you. Why would you want to do this? The answer to that question is simple and self-evident: because what is enjoyed by one person will likely be enjoyed by other people who share the same interests. Once you are part of a group you can send a bookmark to that particular group (), or at least that's that ideal; if you just want to send a particular address to only one person you can do so (), provided that that person is already in your contact list, and to do so there's a specific button (not icon this time) in everyone's profile.
You'll notice a Messages link in the main navigation panel, and that's exactly where the bookmark (and only the bookmark) will go once you send it to your friend. At the moment you cannot send a traditional message to someone, unless you send it along with a bookmark. This might change in the future, depending on user feedback, as well as the addition of some place to actually have some sort of discussion and comments - or so I've been told.
I'd be happy to see more community-specific functionalities being implemented, but there are some inevitable risks if Ma.gnolia decides to take this road. I'll let them decide, but for now, Ma.gnolia is more social than other services, but less social than, say, a discussion board.

Pages, stats and search
Perhaps one of the coolest features Ma.gnolia offers is the possibility of saving pages online. When you bookmark a web page, Ma.gnolia attempts to save an exact copy of that page on its server, so that you can access that resource even if it is deleted at the source, like an improved personal version of the WayBack Machine!
Two things need to be said - and yes, they might be obvious for some people:
1) Pages which require some sort of authentication cannot be saved; and
2) Saved copies cannot be viewed by people other than yourself.

Another feature is the ability to access basic statistics regarding bookmarks and people: most viewed or most recent bookmarks, hot groups, hot tags, as well as featured linkers, i.e., people who Ma.gnolia chooses to be displayed in some pages. They are generally well-known members or institutions that use the service.
However, the search function disappointed me a little bit. There is a very entertaining story on their About page[17] on how Social Bookmarking is supposed to help people to find things on the Web, and the last part in particular is pretty informative:

[...]In Ma.gnolia, people can save website addresses (or the 'url') and "tag" them with that words they think people need to find them in a search. That way, when somebody else searches a term, the websites that show up are only the ones that are good enough for real people to want to find them.
With Ma.gnolia, that's really all the work you have to do. Organizing is a thing of the past, since tags do the organizing for you. Magnolia will even suggest when to give certain tags to bookmarks based on how you tag other bookmarks, to keep things consistent and up to date. And since it's a website, your Ma.gnolia bookmark collection can be reached by you and your friends from anywhere, any time.
If searching was the first day of the web, finding what you want must be the second. Ready to discover how Found is the New Search? Give Ma.gnolia a try, and see what we mean.

It seemed logical, so I tried it myself. I searched for "ajax framework", and nine of the ten results on the first page led to this document:

ASP.NET AJAX framework comparison [18]

This is undoubtedly an interesting document, but not what I was looking for, and I certainly didn't expect almost the entire first page to consist of the same document. I asked for an explanation of this apparently odd behaviour, and it appears that the developer is aware of this, and explained me why this must happen: if someone saved www.zzine.org as "zZine Magazine" and another person saved it as "Microsoft", someone searching for Microsoft - provided that we don't show duplicate links anymore, will find a link to zZine Magazine as one of the first results, and it would not be relevant. This is due to the fact that the system searches tags, titles, and descriptions even if the URL is the same, or known. Still, I'd try to limit the number of identical results, at least by grouping together entries which have the same URL and title, or something along these lines.

Tools to play with
There's a whole section of the site devoted to Support and Tools, to make the whole thing even more user friendly. Regarding the support part, even the greenest of visitors to a social bookmarking site will have no problems, as everything is explained in very simple terms, and full of examples and tutorials. This can be an annoying read if you already know how social bookmarking works and if you're used to similar services, so my advice is: geeks stay out of this section - it will save pointless rants.
The upside of this is that if I send someone who has never used something like this before, he'll like it and definitely start using it; if you try this with del.icio.us, you'll have one less non-geek friend.

Regarding the tools subsection, I already mentioned the excellent bookmark importer (which worked perfectly, but should probably warn in case a page cannot be imported due to a 404 error). Ma.gnolia also offers:

- a del.icio.us importer
- del.icio.us to ma.gnolia GreaseMonkey script - to keep your del.icio.us and ma.gnolia synchronized
- a link roll generator, to share your bookmarks on your blog or page
- a universal bookmark exporter

Additionally, and most importantly, various bookmarklets[19] which allow you to instantly add a bookmark to your ma.gnolia collection with a single click, just like adding an ordinary bookmark. Not new, but useful and essential.

Conclusions
Ma.gnolia is definitely the best social bookmarking solution currently available for non-web savvy users. If you don't like having to spend more than five minutes figuring out how social bookmarking works, Ma.gnolia will become your new home, and you'll get addicted to it. I don't consider myself a total geek, and I honestly started using Ma.gnolia because it's simple and does the job...

...or perhaps the website is just so easy to use and nice to navigate that makes it harder to browse away!

Notes
[1]Social Bookmarking, Wkipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking
[2]Web 2.0, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
[3]del.icio.us Social bookmarking: http://del.icio.us
[4]de.lirio.us Social bookmarking: http://de.lirio.us
[5]Shadows Social Bookmarking: http://www.shadows.com
[6]CyberArmy Community: http://www.cyberarmy.net
[7]Ruby on Rails framework: http://www.rubyonrails.org
[8]Ma.gnolia Social Bookmarking: http://ma.gnolia.com
[9]Internet Relay Chat, wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat
[11]Windows XP Official Page: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/default.mspx
[12]CSSZenGarden: http://www.csszengarden.com/
[13]Darren Barefoot's Blog, Sugar Ma.gnolia, Blossoms Blooming:
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2006/02/sugar-magnolia-blossoms-blooming.html
[14]Ajax, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29
[15]Google Mail: http://mail.google.com/
[16]Archive.org: http://www.archive.org/
[17]Ma.gnolia - About: http://ma.gnolia.com/about
[18] Daniel Zeiss, "ASP.NET AJAX framework comparison": http://www.daniel-zeiss.de/AJAXComparison/Results.htm
[19]Ma.gnolia - Bookmarkles directory: http://ma.gnolia.com/support/bookmarklets

What is AJAX?

2006-01-12T06:30:08Z

"The Web is changing. The 30-year-old terminal-like technology it was originally is gradually giving way to new ways of doing things. The power of AJAX allows for rich user interaction without the trouble that has bugged traditional web applications."This is the introduction to the script.aculo.us[1] website, and regardless your opinion about the so-called AJAX programming technique, they are fundamentally right: the web is changing. AJAX is at least one way to do things in a different way, enhancing - although arguably, in some cases - users' browsing experience.

Application examples
What is AJAX then? Nothing too new, but not too old either. I'd define AJAX as the rebirth of Javascript, for example, it's not only Javascript we're talking about. The acronym stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML and it already gives an idea of the fundamentals of the technology: something build on asynchronous server requests and responses . This may be clear to coders, but the best way to try explaining this to everyday internet users is showing some famous applications:

Gmail[2]: The first example? The most famous? The most used? Perhaps. Google aimed to impress both end users and geeks with it's free, long awaited email service. What's so unusual in this webmail application?

An innovative and intuitive interface, more similar to a desktop application than a traditional webpage.
Rich formatting through an effective, easy-to-use editor.
Online spell checker.
Instant

Email auto save.

Kiko[3]: This is a very neat online calendar, free to use and customizable. Features include:

Multiple user/contacts/events administration.
Personalization of the right click menu

Drag and drop events across the calendar.
Easily switch through different calendar views without any page refresh.
-

Writely[4]: An online word processor. Although it is not as advanced as its desktop's cousins, this is a truly admirable effort to port a desktop application to the web. The service is free for now and it allows users to create, edit, share and export text documents. Among its features there are:

High degree of document formatting - modify font size, style, colors, alignment, insert images and links etc.
Enhanced exporting options - it can create html documents, Word documents, zip files etc.
Online spell-checker.
Ability to easily share and publish your work.

This list can continue[5], as new "AJAX-powered" applications are created nearly every day.

AJAX provides the web developer the ability to create web applications that look and feel like applications that run on the desktop. It does this by solving the 'partial update' problem. AJAX makes it possible for a web application to request data from the server (usually in response to a button click or other java script 'event') and change a part of the current page to reflect the result of the query. Prior to AJAX, if the web developer wanted to retrieve any information from the server a full page update was required. This may mean a full page load when the user clicks a help icon, spell checks a document or performs a drag and drop operation that changes data on the server. AJAX solves this problem and opens the door for a host of AJAX-powered web applications
There were some unconventional solutions to this problem prior to AJAX. I have ignored them for the purpose of this article as they were hacky or relied on a feature in a particular browser

How does it work?
Ajax[7] is fundamentally the union of various technologies - not something new by itself:

The XMLHttpRequest

The Dom Object Model

XML and XSLT used for data interchange and manipulation

The magic is undoubtedly in the XMLHttpRequest object, originally invented by Microsoft as an ActiveX object and then made available as a standard Javascript class by Mozilla-based browsers. At least something which seems to be compatible with most browsers then.

A necessary step in any Javascript script using the XMLHttpRequest object would be something like:



if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari, ...

    http_request = new XMLHttpRequest();

} else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE

    http_request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");

}

In order to have an http_request object to use later on which is independent from the browser type.

Let's now examine an example of elementary Ajax application[10]. The following code is broken into different parts and commented, the uncommented source and a demo is available on degraeve.com[10].

For this simple example we need to create a simple server-side script which will be called by our Ajax application. The script can be in any language, this one is in Perl.



#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use CGI;



$query = new CGI;



$secretword = $query-param('w');

$remotehost = $query-remote_host();



print $query-header;

print "

The secret word is $secretword and your IP is $remotehost.

Basically it creates a new CGI object named $query, used to access the parameter which will be passed by our submission form, "w", and get the user's IP address.
The script will then print a the page header and a phrase containing the word entered in our form and the user's IP address.

And here's the simple Ajax application:

Simple Ajax Example



  

  onclick='JavaScript:xmlhttpPost("/cgi-bin/simple-ajax-example.cgi")'

Comment: This is the final part of the application, which defines our form containing a text field and a submit button. Note that our xmlhttpPost function is called once the button is clicked, through the on click attribute.

That's it.
The first reaction after reading so far would probably be "Ajax is not easy at all", well, I never said it was. To create a simple application which just prints something on the screen we had to go through a lot of code, and we could have done something similar with much less hassle. This was just a trivial example, very different from those large scale applications available online.

There's good news though, there are plenty of frameworks and toolkits which makes life easier for developers interested in using this programming technique. There are in particular various libraries built upon the Prototype[11] framework such as the already mentioned Script.aculo.us[1] and Rico[12] for examples, and various frameworks which integrate Ajax in some way in any server side language, like Ruby on Rails[13] or CakePHP[14], for example.

Conclusion
Undoubtedly Ajax can be used to create really powerful and innovative applications, but it shouldn't be abused or mis-used. There are a few things to keep in mind, when developing an Ajax application:

It requires Javascript to be enable on the client browser, and the developer obviously can't control that
The application may not compatible with all browsers, in particular older browsers will definitely not be able to access it.
It can be too much of a surprise for the user who never used an Ajax application before: it may experience delays in responses, some basic functionalities like the "Back" button might not work as expected etc.

There are actually many more things to consider [15] before even start planning to develop an application, and can basically be summarized as follows:

"Do not use Ajax in your web application unless you know what you're doing"

Luckily, there are a lot of articles and resources[16] out there, waiting for you.

Notes and Resources
[small]
[1] Script.aculo.us AJAX toolkit: http://www.script.aculo.us
[2] Gmail - Google's online webmail: http://mail.google.com/mail
[3] Kiko - Online calendar: http://www.kiko.com/
[4] Writely - Online word processor: http://www.writely.com/
[5] A venture forth Blog - Top 10 Ajax applications: http://www.aventureforth.com/?p=13
[6] HTTP - Webopedia entry: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/H/HTTP.html
[7] AJAX - Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
[8] XMLHTTP Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHTTP

[9] Dom Object Model - Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Object_Model
[10] degraeve.com - Simple Ajax Example: http://www.degraeve.com/reference/simple-ajax-example.php
[11] Prototype Javascript Framework: http://prototype.conio.net/
[12] Rico open-source Javascript library: http://openrico.org/
[13] Ruby on Rails: http://www.rubyonrails.org
[14] CakePHP framework: http://www.cakephp.org
[15] Alex Bosworth's Weblog: Ajax Mistakes: http://sourcelabs.com/ajb/archives/2005/05/ajax_mistakes.html
[16] AjaxMatters.com: http://www.ajaxmatters.com/r/welcome
[/small]