There has been a lot of brouhaha over Ma.gnolia going open source and Im not sure most of it is justified. There are certainly features that work to Ma.gnolias advantage, but even though embracing open source and data portability (among other features) improve the service, they are unlikely to make it competitive.

Not only is Ma.gnolia minuscule compared to Yahoos Delicious (recently relaunched to version 2.0), but compared to Yahoos Buzz and Digg, even Delicious itself is minuscule and thats not about to change.

The times, theyre a-changin

The launch of Yahoos Buzz was a somewhat controversial move on the companys part. First, many thought that it would cannibalize the Delicious user base (which Im now sure it will to an extent), second, it launched with an incredibly exclusive beta and several severe limitations in social capabilities (most of which still exist today), and third, it was yet another large corporation taking a shot at the house that Digg built.

Regardless, it was also a brilliant move and not just for the reasons Ive mentioned before. Traffic figures and user acceptance have been excellent, (already surpassing Digg by some measures), and recent reviews have been generally positive. Apart from displaying Yahoos ability to enter and dominate a space within a matter of months, it also shows that they understand the changing landscape of the social bookmarking space.

Even after the launch of delicious 2.0, the service no longer grips the imagination (or even fleeting fascination) of the digerati, who have already moved on from social bookmarking to social news and networking, and perhaps the launch of Yahoo Buzz in advance of the Delicious relaunch was Yahoos way of hedging its bets.

All that is to say that bookmarking as a social activity is soon to become a thing of the past. In fact there is already interest in non-social bookmarking with services like Instapaper (my personal favorite) popping up everywhere you turn. As people move away from the rather passive activity of sharing bookmarks to actively participating in the submission, promotion, and propagation of news and networking on the basis of their interests, social news and networking sites are bound to replace bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia and Delicious.

The only reason to make bookmarking social was so that you could find new sites from people that share interests or activities with you. StumbleUpon has done such a par excellence job of doing exactly that, it further diminishes the importance of sharing bookmarks in the traditional sense.

But thats not all

Even if there was hope for the social bookmarking space, there are several other points to consider.

- Open source without a willing community means nothing. Developers, developers, developers! Going open source allows people freely to interact with and build for/on your platform, but you need people who want to do this, for it to be fruitful.

- Social news and networking is already open source. Weve had pligg for a very long time now, plus there is Meneame and more recently Reddit has also gone open source.

- Just because you built it doesnt mean theyll come. You dont have to look much farther than mixx to realize that you can do everything right, have all the right partnerships in place, and still not get the following you deserve. Success rarely comes easy and almost never overnight.

While Ma.gnolias efforts are commendable they dont predict a very bright future for the site and the ongoing decline in use and impending obsolescence of social bookmarking is partly to blame.

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow him on Twitter.

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