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.

Hi-

Haven’t tried this yet, but it looks like it could work for me. I’d like to suggest that the developers explore http://www.wurldbook.com, a great little web app that I’ve used for the past couple of years. I wouldn’t consider switching, but wurldbook has a couple of flaws that I can’t ignore any more–frequent login problems, no social bookmarking features, and very slow load times are the big complaints. But beyond that, it’s got a great set of features that no one else has. It works as both an RSS reader and a bookmarker, so that if you see a news item you like, you can permanently save it in your bookmarks, a very useful feature. It also lets you generate public lists of links with auto-RSS feeds, has really powerful tagging features, and plenty more. It would be great to see some of this stuff make its way into markaboo.

Hope,
Thanks for the kind words. The bookmarks definitely are diversifying, although some of the content is ummm, not quite family friendly.

We’ve definitely been experiencing some growing pains. We had a few unoptimized database queries that Deigo (the other developer) and I have been working really hard on overnight. We also lost a RAID drive, had intermittent problems with our T3 and had a power problem at our co-location site overnight.

It’s a bit disappointing to get such a great response from the community of our peers only to hit scaling issues and a string of Murphy’s Law style bad luck.

On the positive side, we’ve worked through a lot of the issues on the database side with some clever optimizations and our new hardware seems to be doing the job. Hopefully, the community will be as forgiving of our missteps as they have been welcoming to MarkaBoo.

We’ll be doing some heavy testing, refactoring, and optimization over the next week to make MarkaBoo as fast and reliable as the bigger names out there, and I’d like to remind the community that this is an open-source community-driven project so your feedback (positive or negative) is very, very much appreciated — and so is your help! We released the code on Rubyforge (ugly warts and all) so feel free to dive in. Together we can make MarkaBoo the best social bookmarking site around!

Thanks for your support and patience.

How do you delete a folder? It appears I have to delete everything in it before it deletes itself. There’s gotta be a faster way to do this. Otherwise, it’s a cool site.

frankly, I do not why such a glowing review on this? there is not a single feature that is unique or innovative.

just because it is open-source? 99.99% of the users only care if the service and features are good. In terms of those, several other services (like diigo, delicious ) beats this one hands-down

David,

I’m sorry you feel that way. I beg to differ that there are no innovative features, there are several! I don’t know of a single bookmarking service that lets you phone in bookmarks or store files or create your own content and bookmark it in the same context as your urls. In the end, however, the community can see everything we’re doing very publicly (down to the source code) and influence the future direction of their bookmarking service. The other services, though excellent in their own right, simply have completely different goals.

Best regards,
Christian

I just tried it out but it didn’t import my del.icio.us feeds.

With the added ads, it’s hard to say this is any better, especially with no apparent export feature and the missing bookmarklets and tools in place by 3rd party sites all over the web for del.icio.us integration.

Maybe it’s the new and coming thing but I doubt I’ll ever pay for cellphone web service, I hate phones and ads lol.

With my 5200+ tags, I would still jump tomorrow if the export feature was easier than what I have to go thru now with slow 3rd party site utilities and a posting tool for my FF right-click became available.

I guess you have something against Y! lol. G/L.

Thanks for sharing your comments folks, and we’re doing a deeper researching on the topic these days.

Where does the overflowing praise come from? How long did you use markaboo before you wrote this review? There is not a search and no tagclouds, and many little bugs all over the place like link that go nowhere on the import page. This is the techcrunch ideal of what makes awesome web services??? Come on.

Brian, as a first iteration of an open source version of a utility type service, I think that this one has some cool features and promise for the future. Unfortunately, had I used this tool for much longer it wouldn’t be news. Given the speed at which the developers have responded to criticisms in comments here, I think there’s all the more reason for optimism. Take it or leave it though!

Brian,

We take constructive criticism to heart, and are busy improving MarkaBoo. As Marshall mentioned, it’s not a 1.0 release and is open source. Anyone can drop by Rubyforge and look at the code in its entiretly - warts and all. We are currently improving our performance and scalability issues and have made big progress in that arena in the past 2 days. We’re working closely with experts at MySql to tune things even further. That said, the little UI bugs are on the list of things to fix, and searching and exporting of bookmarks will be the next 2 major features added. What we think makes MarkaBoo worth checking out are its innovations (files, notes, bookmark from email and phone), our openness both in the sense of releasing the code, as well as in admitting what needs improvement.

We’re big believers in the open source mantra “Release early, release often” and in the tenets of the Cluetrain manifesto. Rather than sit in an ivory tower, we started with what we knew to be some killer enhancements over other bookmarking sites and made a very concious decision to let the community tell us what it wants in a bookmarking service as we march to version 1.0. Our reasoning is simple, users will want to use a service that has the features they requested. We have some very stiff and professional competition, but our goals and philospophies are a little different. We’re betting that in the long term, our approach to the community will make a big difference.

That said, please keep the feedback coming. We want to hear it all, good or bad. The good stuff gets us through the long days and the not so good stuff makes MarkaBoo better.

Incidentally, we do have tag clouds when viewing bookmarks and also when adding them and are about to release a small enhancement to this feature - logarithmic smoothing of the cloud - that should make it a lot more usable.

Thanks,
Christian Romney

I am having problems connecting to Markaboo Service from yesterday evening. Is it because of overwhelming access due to this entry?

Yhanawa, if you check out the developer’s blog http://xml-blog.com you’ll see that they are getting so much traffic so fast that I imagine they are overwhelmed. Here’s hoping they can do it!

Here are a few gripes I have with Markaboo. Presumably, the TechCrunch effect made Markaboo dog-slow the last few days. I would click and wait 5 seconds for it to take effect. Today, it was behaving reasonably. There was no message saying “due to TechCrunch, we’re being swamped, which may affect results, but we’re working on it, and it should be good”.

I’d also consider having customizable views. One reason I prefer reddit to digg is that I get 25 results per page, rather than a few results per page. I’d like a view that gives me 25 a page in a small simple format (others can have the default).

There’s no feedback page (I’m using TechCrunch to followup, since there’s no button saying “Give us feedback”). Christian says that they take constructive criticism, but there’s no place to give it. The screenshot above only has “Add website, Add note, Add file, Import”. There’s no basic tutorial (ma.gnolia, for example, tries to explain why bookmarking, and how you would use it).

Browser buttons should have a pop-up option and a wait to tag later option. (One of the competitors does this–I forget which). Pop-ups would allow me not to physically leave the page.

I’d prefer the tags to be separated by commas to allow multiword tags.

Perhaps allow for internal rankings of the bookmarks, so you can have your most important ones at the top.

Have a “calendar” view indicating when you added the bookmark, for example:

June 23
9:00 PM del.icio.us
9:15 PM yahoo.com

June 20
8:23 AM flickr.com

Allow for multiple deletions of bookmarks (using checkmarks), preferably more Web 2.0 style rather than the Javascript popups. I imported a bunch of bookmarks from my browser, but many of them are useless outside the company, but I have to manually delete one at a time.

Have some location that keeps us up with useful stat information. As yhanawa just mentioned, there was traffic, but no indication to the new user trying it out (reading a blog to find out information is not acceptable–way too geeky, even if the crowd is a TechCrunch crowd).

I can imagine people turned off by complete lack of responsiveness. There should have been some way to indicate to new users that this was not typical. I would imagine Markaboo should email the new people and tell them to try it out again soon.

I can’t figure out how to export from del.icio.us….

Shadows.com made it really easy to import bookmarks from del.icio.us. Too bad their tag-implementation/organization abilities suck. They could be real contenders if they got it together. They show thumbnail screenshots of webpages bookmarked.

Charles,
Thanks for the feedback. It’s true the site has been dog slow, for many reasons. From bad hardware to bad queries to too many hits to stupid people.
You name it, it happened.
There was some gross miscommunication internally on the requirements of the site. At the apex of it, a part time IT guy removed markaboo’s database access rights because of the increased usage ;-( Bringing down the site for an extended amount of time).
Hopefully everything has been cleared out.
We still have some more issues to resolve but the storm is well way behind us.

Charles:
* The feedback section should be there by tuesday.
* We were actually already switching to comma separated tags. It makes me happy that to hear that we were on the right track on that one.
* I am coming up with a whole bunch of different bookmarklets so I’ll throw in the popup one just for you ;D Go to my blog and let me know how you would like it to work. (my guess would be popup window, type tags, close window on submit)
* The stats page was in the works until the IT incident. We have to rework the schedule for it.
* I personally love the calendar idea, (maybe because I wrote many calendar applications :-).
* Multiple deletion is in the works. About the js popup, yes we’ll get rid of it. We’ll put some lipstick on it to adhere more to the web2.0 culture, t.
* There will be a settings page to customize your markaboo very soon.
* The ranking/ratings is already there, (it defaults to the medium settings=3), the page is just missing the link to reorder the list by ranking.

For everybody: The export is coming up right away, I think wednesday, worse case friday, Need to talk to Chris.

We also have a few tricks/features of our own up our sleeves.
Wow, we are going to have a really busy week.
If we don’t get dragged in too many meetings =) or we find a new bottleneck ;( we should address most of the community’s concerns right away.

Thanks again for the feedback.
Diego

kaff33filter,
to export your bookmarks from delicious, you first login, go to settings, then export. You’ll see 2 checkboxes for your preferences and then you’ll get all of your bookmarks in html format.
Save the file locally and then upload it to us.
As a note, the upload happens in the background, so depending on how many bookmarks you have, it can take up to a few minutes before you can see your bookmarks on the site.

Diego

Buon luogo, congratulazioni, il mio amico!

Interesting site http://portaldiscount.com/managed-forex/