Some Social Bookmarking Site Goes Open Source

Apparently there's a social bookmarking service called ma.gnolia. com. Ok, not quite fair. I've heard of the site and visited it. Nobody really uses it though. ReadWriteWeb calls it "one of the most popular second tier social bookmarking services on the web", which is brilliant and hilarious, especially since even the "first tier" (ha!!) social bookmarking services are totally unknown to most people.

Wan't proof? The top links at Delicous (the most popular one), currently have to do with stuff like fonts and AJAX web design, which is all you need to know.

Anyway, Ma.gnolia.com is going open source.  Meaning, you can download the Ma.gnolia.com source code and install it on your own server. As Rex Sorgatz pointed out recently, this is the kind of move a company makes once they're on the verge of irrelevance. Reddit recently went open source. Netvibes kind of did.

This isn't to bash open source web apps: Wordpress (the popular blogging platform) has done it to fine effect. The difference is that they started that way and cultivated that. Oh and of course Firefox is a killer example. But hard to see turning your code loose onto the world as a major injection of life.

Actually, the above-linked post from ReadWriteWeb is pretty telling. Read the part under "Why Ma.gnolia is cool" and you'll soon realize exactly what's wrong with this company.