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/