Ma.gnolia 2 (M2): Social Bookmarking for the Open Web

Last week at Gnomedex, the folks at Ma.gnolia announced the launch of their Ma.gnolia 2 (M2) effort, which is an ambitious effort to rethink and rebuild ma.gnolia, with a focus on embracing the open web.

In the Project Charter (curiously only available as a PDF), they lay out these business goals:

• To further embrace and demonstrate the principles of open source development, distributed services and open web standards as a foundation for viable web-based businesses.
• To promote the use and benefits of software features that encourage constructive social interaction.
• To create revenue channels sufficient to sustain and grow Ma.gnolia.
• To ensure that Ma.gnolia can survive and remain useful regardless of the status of Gnolia Systems.

Refreshingly, though, they don’t stop with business goals – they also lay out community goals and individual/organizational goals:

Community Goals

• To enjoy the benefits of shared web-based resources with a minimum of interference from destructive uses, such as spamming.
• To create and strengthen relationships around mutual goals and interests.
• To create and participate in public and private areas for sharing web-based resources.
• To have a sense of control and safety in the use and future development of Ma.gnolia.

Individual/Organizational Goals

• To enjoy presence in a social application with a minimum of interference from destructive uses.
• To have confidence in the reliability and security of the service, and the protection of private information.
• To build social capital with chosen peers in the Ma.gnolia community and/or other communities that
  the service can interact with.
• To enrich personal and/or organizational use of the web as a research, discovery, collaboration and
  publishing tool.

The charter has more to say about the different activities involved in the overall M2 project, including a description of the various communities, products and services which will make up the M2 ecosystem, as shown in this diagram (click for full size):

It’s great to see a company looking at its offerings as an ecosystem involving various kinds of participants, corporate and individual, technical and non-technical, and across many different usage scenarios.

It’d be great to be able to use the open source version in the context of other projects, where relying on the service may not make sense.