Suggestion: Distinguishing Ma.gnolia from the pack

Mr. Halff,

I watched your video. You said something about the need to create a "business model" for Ma.gnolia, and expressed some concern about the number of social bookmarking services. Having looked at most of them, I had a thought.

If one looks at Ma.gnolia as being strictly a place where people leave links, then yes, there are a lot of companies that provide sites where one may do that, as anybody who has ever seen an addthis.com button knows. But let's say that one sees Ma.gnolia as being a place where one not only leaves off bookmarks, but can talk at length about the sites that one has bookmarked.

Then Ma.gnolia ends up in a far smaller crowd, consisting of ... who? Stumbleupon and Diigo would be there, and Diigo is still in beta. A user has to wonder if the latter will stick around.





Suggestion: In the re-release of Ma.gnolia, modify the system so that we can introduce paragraph breaks in the reviews on our profiles, and keep the character limit on those reviews high. Is there even a character limit, at this point? See Ma.gnolia as being, not just a bookmarking site, but a sort of blogging platform as well. That's something that Delicious can't be, because of that service's very stringent character limitation on posts, and cramped format, leaving the user with something that looks more like a classified ad page than a blog.

I've noticed that you were using Adsense. Perhaps that simple increase in functionality might increase your revenue? A page of links without discussion is, perhaps, like a telephone directory; useful, but not really something that a visitor would sit down and read for a few hours. He comes in, he finds a link, and BOOM! he's gone - to a place where he's not seeing the ads on your site. But if he has unique content on your servers to read, he has a reason to linger where he will see those ads, enhancing that part of your revenue stream.

Without being able to insert those paragraph breaks in our reviews, if we try to make essays of them, the essays will become unreadable, hence the suggestion. Would you be open to this?