You’ve got me sold on this, Mike. I’m going to check out first thing tomorrow morning (it’s late here!).

Got an “Application error (Rails)” while trying to sign up. Using Safari 2.x.

Got the same “Application error (Rails)” while trying to import bookmarks from delicious export.
They might have problem taking all the load from techcrunch

Shalin, I see that now too. Firefox works just fine as far as I can tell, but after your comment I tried creating an account in Safari and got the same error mssg. Hope that will be resolved soon!

I will try it with FireFox for now. Thanks for letting me know that. Appreciate it! Cheers!

Your review definitely has me interested, but the problems with importing my del.icio.us bookmarks has me hesitant. I have tried both with IE and Firefox and still have problems. Glad to hear I am not the only one.

I love the third link in your screenshot Mike

“…bookmarks will likely diversify quickly.” That’d be good, as the content is hardcore geeky at this point. Hope that the Web 2.0 and services kinds of categories emerge from I-live-to-code stratosphere. Such is the hope of the technolgically inept Web 2.0 enthusiast. We parasites love RSS feeds that alert us to new tools but our eyes glaze over at talk of CSS and PHP. The “tutorials” category is a case in point here. Maybe they could create a “screencast” category to help us parasites master Web 2.0 tools so that we can help bring Web 2.0 into the workplace so that serious money can be made for all these brilliant people currently talking only to one another.

Actually, Markaboo is not “open source” in the common sense that the Open Source Initiative (opensource.org) has promoted, because of their “noncommercial” restriction. See part 6 of the OSI’s “open source definition”: at http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php#6 .

This is actually quite important because the recent explosion of great tools and companies built on true open source stacks — as so extensively reported at TechCrunch — requires the right to use source code in commercial endeavors.

Markaboo’s offer is one-sided, reserving all commercial benefit of community code improvements for themselves, and atypical of vibrant open source projects. It’s unlikely to attract broad developer support in its current form.

Gordon, thanks for pointing that out. I thought the noncommercial part was strange but didn’t go into it in my review. Glad you did here.

Diigo still has much for itself to give most bookmarking services a bit of sweat.
Unfortunately not made available to the public at large (yet!).

This service definitely has potential, but I think del.icio.us is just easier to use and friendlier. When Markaboo gets a Firefox extension, and they improve their bookmark uploader, this website could take off!

Application error (Rails)

I’ve recently launched a search engine with similar concept. I think it has some good potential as well. People love the concept of a people ranked search engine. Similar to all other booking marking services.

For the curious. That 3rd link is from xmlblog (Christian Romney).

I think ‘tglo’ is ‘The Globe’ from the golden days of the first bubble (according to a whois check). I think ‘tglo’ was their ticket symbol. Not sure why they’re feeling the need to re-brand if that’s the case.

Appilcation Error (Rails). Sexy

Creative-Commons “non commercial” is not an open source license, it’s disingenuous as has been pointed out above.

Scott,
You are right, tglo is the ticket symbol for theglobe.com.
The choice of the name was between Markaboo.com and Tglo-bookmarks.com.
Which one would you rather have, as a developer?
Markaboo it’s an obvious play on the word bookmark.
Brian, Ernie, and whoever gets an application error, or any annoyance for that is, please report it to Christian Romney or submit the bug in the project page (http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?atid=7019&group_id=1793&func=browse).
If you have get errors while trying to import bookmarks from delicious export send us the file if you could so that we can fix the import script.
We would really appreciate it.

I can understand why FURL is not more popular. Itś the best. http://furl.net

let me know if i’m wrong - what is the big deal with online bookmarking / tagging? i can see how del.icio.us is useful; i can get my bookmarks wherever i am. (usually only work or home). i personally use bookmarks on my personalized google page. i tried delicious, but it just didn’t catch on with me. maybe i just don’t use the web as much as everyone else.

it almost seems like it’s human indexing instead of search engine indexing. is that the catchy part of this?

it also seems like it would be ripe for people to capitalize on this somehow, using automated clicking / tagging tools. has anyone commoditized tagging yet?

Hi Diego, if that’s us as in we as in Markaboo (as in you’re part of the team) I think our readers would love to read or be pointed to some discussion about the non commercial clause in the CC license.

Beyond that, great work on Markaboo.

This looks OK but annoying (all of the above) plus no autofill info for a bookmark. I can´t understand why FURL is not more popular. It´s the best. http://furl.net

Casley, I didn’t see any problem with autofill of the bookmark in FF at least. On Furl, I used Furl super loyally for a long time - advocated it loudly. Eventually I just couldn’t put up with the unwieldy drop down box for “topic” (tag) selection, it made me scream every time I used it. I had extensive conversations with some of the folks behind furl like 6 months ago, they told me that major changes were about to happen, and as far as I can tell they haven’t yet. But the cached copies of the pages you save in Furl and a number of other features really are great. Can I send a note to myself or a tagged picture from my phone to Furl though? No way.

See zurpy.com it’s been storing/tagging bookmarks, files, notes, AND pictures, AND feeds for months. It was made by a 19-year-old UCSD student.

Marshall,
Christian would be the right person to talk to about the license agreement. Don’t cite me on this, my understanding of the license is that you can get the copy of Markaboo and relase it as your own application for as long as you’re not making money out of it and give credit to theglobe.com. I have not delved into the details of that license.

As the “us” comment I work for theglobe.com and work closely with Christian, but I have been working on a different project. (after this maybe tomorrow I’ll join his team :D)
BTW, I already reported some of the critiques/bugs (safari + rails errors) to Chris and we already narrowed down 2 bugs. (i have a suspicion about the safari one).
He’s working on them tonight.
So most likely tomorrow he’ll push the fixes to production.
I have not been able to reproduce the import error, so if anybody would send us the failing file, we’d love to include it in our tests.

Tried to import booksmarks that were exported from IE and it failed (no confirmation message or error, just an empty page of bookmarks).

Wow, what a great Father’s Day gift to see my labor of love being used and debated by the tech community. We’ll be hitting those bugs first thing in the morning to get them squared away. Del.icio.us importing is obviously a top priority as is the overall quality of the user experience regardless of browser.

As for the licensing, it’s not a dead issue. We are definitely open (no pun intended) to listening to what the community has to say on this point and may very well open it up under a license that is less restrictive like the GPL in the next day or two.

The reason for selecting a more restrictive license initially was that this is a new endeavor for most companies — opening up the code for their bread and butter. I felt instinctively that it would be a Good Thing to do so, but it would have been a much tougher sell internally. Given the warm reception MarkaBoo has enjoyed in the community thus far, I feel confident that we can make the license more free. The last thing we want is to let a licensing issue slow the community’s adoption of or enthusiasm for MarkaBoo.

Hi, Christian. I just clicked on, “Check out this sample.” after the wording “Host online study groups. Upload your syllabus, class notes, or study guide and use MarkaBoo’s comment system to create a discussion…” hoping to see whether I wanted to set up an account. But I have to register to check out the sample. Very annoying to have to register before seeing whether it would be worthwhile registering. You have just got to make things easier for first-time visitors. There are dozens of social bookmarking sites out there and one has only so much time and patience. Just trying to be helpful! Don’t ya just love input?

A screencast of various of the features you offer would be a good move, too. And don’t make us reigster to see ‘em, please.

Hope

It looks interesting but so far it doesn’t seem to be importing my file. I suspect I’ll be sticking with del.icio.us

I’ve been using Furl for ages and have very few complaints. Tagging, searching, sharing, importing, exporting.. it all there. The interface is clean and the filtering on the search and listing pages is full featured and intuitive. I’ve actually been using the category feature and javascript snippets to power the links on my blog for over a year.

I’m surprised it hasn’t caught on with a bigger crowd. The front page is all nerd sh*t.

not bad, but if I can’t import my deliciouses….well….years and years of bookmarking lost!!!

The current license won’t help you much as it clearly discourage others from contributing to the code (unless you’re intentionally targeting academia). Relax the license so other can help you with documentation, features and bug fixes (at least those who’ll use it on their sites). And all the better if those using it could back link to you. As the saying goes when the tide rises, all our boats float a little higher…

There is no way I am going to subscribe to a new service to replace my old one just because its new and on TechCrunch.

Marshall - can you please put forward some reasons why I should consider this as an alternative? Like you I was a furler for a long time, and having finally made the change, and enjoy using the social network functions, notably for:whoever (surprisingly powerful).

So *why* are you considering go markaboo instead?

As most of you I did not succeeded in importing my Del.icio.us bookmarks and the website seems slow and buggy. One interesting thing though is that you can post multimedia files and they host them for free.

We’re adding another server today, so the speed issues should disappear soon. We’re also expecting big gains from some caching improvements we’ve got lined up. Hope, your point is well-taken on the samples it’s something we’re working on addressing - and yes I *love* the feedback. We’re taking the good with the bad and using it to build a better tool for the community. We’ve heard you all loud and clear and are working hard at addressing the licensing issue (we’ll be removing the non-commercial restriction today), the import from del.icio.us bug, the Safari signup issue, and the speed of the site. Please keep the feedback pouring in and we promise to stay on top of the issues.

James - not sure what would convince you to leave Furl, so why don’t I turn the question around. What do you think would convince you to make the switch. As stated in the article, we’re letting the community drive the features that make it into 1.0. Propose an enhancement and it’ll receive due consideration.

Thanks again to the entire community for trying MarkaBoo. We’re working hard to keep you happy!

strict, you are right - Markaboo allows upload of multi-media files. Also you may find interesting that you can add text/articles directly on the site using a set of pre-defined layouts (Add Note):

http://www.markaboo.com/people.....tudy-guide

This would be absolutely the killer bookmarking app for me … IF (are you listening, Christian?) it cached a current page copy when you added a bookmark! This is the ONE feature that Furl, Spurl, Ma.gnolia and Diigo have that make them stand out, for me — i really don’t LIKE the interfaces of any of them, but i keep being stuck with one or another of them because of that one feature! Please, *please* add it! (Spurl and Furl both limit cached copies to 250Kb, incidentally … that way they prevent HUGE pages from cluttering up their server.)

–Adrienne

James, here’s why I’m considering switching

1. notes pages, let me add a page of text to my tagged archives without it having to be tied to a specific URL but to a tag

2. upload by phone. I love the idea of being able to snap a photo on my phone and easily add it by tag to my archive of URLs and notes pages

3. open source - particularly if this service can come to terms with the noncommercial issue, I just like the idea of using a service that exposes its code and welcomes a community of user developers into the hopefully ongoing developement. The wide world of del.icio.us plug ins, etc. developed by outside users through the api is great, but this seems a step better to me

That said, before switching completely I will use both for a week or so and I’ll make sure especially that my data is safe in markaboo. I trust the stability of del.icio.us almost like a public utility at this point, so I will be careful in moving. But I’m going to look into it.

The RailsDay2006 link needs a .com on the end.

Adrienne,
I agree that’s a killer feature. I’ll be looking into the mechanics of how these sites serve you back the cached page. Keep the suggestions coming, we’re definitely trying to keep on top of the community’s needs!

Marshall,
We’ve already addressed a few items on the list here and are working on the others. Specifically, to address Hope’s point we’ve fixed the issue where you had to be logged in to view other people’s bookmarks. Also, we’ve updated the license to Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike (removing the Non-commercial clause). Hopefully this will show our good faith and keep the community interest piqued. Thanks for the review and the vote of confidence.

Christian, that’s great. Good move on the license, since you made that change so fast I’ve updated the original post.

Marshall,
I can’t believe you didn’t mention Simpy, especially since it “acquired” de.lirio.us just last week!

Also, saving and tagging notes not associated with a URL is not a new thing - Simpy let you tag them, keep them private, and full-text search them. This particular feature is maaaaany moons old.

I’m pleased to report that the Safari issue on user signup has been taken care of.

Whew. Ok, imports should now be working. Thanks again to everyone for checking us out.

Um, yeah. Might be cool. If it could actually import my Firefox bookmarks file. But all I get is “Application Error (Ruby)”. Open source and great features are nice… but this feels like it should be in private beta while some very basic stuff gets worked out.

Hmmm… just saw Christian’s comment, so I tried again after clearing the cache and reloading. Refresh on my page was pretty slow… but the import worked. You’ve gotta love web applications!

Now to explore those cool features…

I’d appreciate it if the First Name/Last Name fields in the signup were optional instead of compulsory, i’m not that fond of entering more information than strictly necessary.

Thanks for the review. I have been using delicious as well, but I’m giving Markaboo a go based on this review. I’ve just imported all my bookmarks from delicious - they must have fixed all problems now. It went very smoothly and quickly.

Hi, Christian. Well, you win the trophy for being responsive. A-okay in my book on that score. One does like having her points addressed. Oooh, nice–love ya, guy.

Way to go on eliminating the barriers to viewing other people’s bookmarks. But the site seems really slow at this point and I’m getting, “File not found.” Not good; not good.

Also, so far many of the bookmarks are links to commercial sites a la ehub. We already have ehub. Emily does all that for us. What we needs are bookmarks with real substance, a la Connotea–only on Web 2.0 topics. That’ll come once the glitches are worked out. As Marshall says, …shared bookmarks will likely diversify quickly” They are pretty dry at this point if your goal is attracting someone other than an acronym-loving 28 year-old guy in close proximity to something electronic. And so far there are hardly any tags, just the bookmarks. At least that is what seems to me to be the case. Hard to tell for sure, given the glacial pace at which things are running.

James: Seems to me that Marshall had pretty cleared laid in his original posting the rationale for trying MarkaBoo. Not quite clear on how Marshall could have been clearer.

Ah me. I wish there weren’t this obsession with photos (you and your gizmos, Marshall, silly boy) on the web. There are a few of us fogies left enamored with text. So much for that form of communication.

You are very sweet, Christian.