Beside online calendaring, which was recently featured by Michael Arrington on Techcrunch, no other application gets more attention than social bookmarking these days. Most of us started with del.icio.us, then we played with BlinkList, Diigo, or Simpy. The last to date is ma.gnolia, for which I received a preview account today. As usual, Brian Benzinger from Solution Watch offered a great early review. Here are my own first impressions.

Ma.gnolia offers the same basic services as most social bookmarking tools, including tagging, syndication and badges. Private bookmarks are supported, which makes it compliant with one of the most important rules for Office 2.0. One-click rating is offered as well, much like BlinkList does it. But ma.gnolia separates itself from the pack for two reasons:

First, it has one of the best user interfaces I have seen. It’s clean, simple, and pleasing to the eye. And because a social bookmarking tool is one of the services that you will end up using the most during a typical day of work, a nice looking user interface is something to consider when selecting your tool of choice.

Second, it seems that the people at Gnolia Systems have really tried to understand and develop the ‘social’ part of social bookmaking. In this effort, they’ve added the ability to create groups of people and send messages among groups, similarly to what 30 Boxes is doing for online calendars. This nevertheless creates an interesting challenge, which is the sharing of groups among social tools such as ma.gnolia and 30 Boxes. Today, if I wanted to use both services to support the collaborative work of a group I belong to, I would have to create separate groups and duplicate invitations, instead of using a single interface to manage my group. What I need is the equivalent of single sign on for groups, and this is one of the many interoperability services that are missing today for the establishment of Office 2.0 as a true platform. I will address this issue in tomorrow’s post.

Ma.gnolia is still in beta stage, but its developers seem to be very responsive to requests for improvements, such as the ability to modify or remove tags for groups of bookmarks, something that you take for granted with del.icio.us. If they manage to add features faster than del.icio.us does today, without compromising the streamlined user interface, I would expect that ma.gnolia will become something close to the perfect social bookmarking tool a lot of users have been waiting for. And if it manages to support interoperability with other social tools such as 30 Boxes or the upcoming Collective X recently featured on Techcrunch, it could very well become the nexus of social collaboration within an Office 2.0 working environment.