Sunday, October 12, 2008

del.icio.us vs. ma.gnolia

Next to the obvious difference in appearance (ma.gnolia has a much "cleaner" look than del.icio.us) and some other features (ma.gnolia allows users to rate bookmarked sites and saves/displays a copy of each bookmarked webpage), I feel that the most pertinent difference between the two sites lies in their number of users. Delicious appears to have a substantially greater following in the social bookmarking arena. (Using my own bookmarks in the two sites as an example, 954 other people bookmarked the poetry site I marked in Delicious, while only 15 others did in Magnolia. 169 people marked the Scrabble site I marked in Delicious, while I was the ONLY one to do so in Magnolia.) This makes me feel that Delicious would be a better site to use for social bookmarking (no matter what it looks like and despite any other bells and whistles it may lack) because the power of social bookmarking in organizing the Web and allowing users to find sites of interest and relevance lies in its users. This really is an arena where there is "power in numbers".

1 comment:

Spung Mills History Room said...

I think your point about volume being an important thing in social bookmarking is a very good point. I'm also glad that you bookmarked sites in both services and compared the number of users who had bookmarked each. That just brings the point home nicely.