Ma.gnolia was a social book­mark­ing tool with well-thought-out fea­tures like Saved Copies (so you nev­er lost a web page, even if it moved or went offline), Book­mark Rat­ings, Book­mark Pri­va­cy, and Groups. It even had a well-authored Linkroll that could be used on any web­site. We designed the prod­uct and devel­oped many of its features.

To do so, we iden­ti­fied prob­lems with exist­ing social book­mark­ing tools, con­ceived new fea­tures, and con­sol­i­dat­ed best-of-breed func­tions for this still-emerg­ing genre of web appli­ca­tion. Our infor­ma­tion archi­tects devel­oped user path­ways, while our design­ers craft­ed a strong brand iden­ti­ty and a rich, creamy site design.

Sad­ly, a tech­ni­cal calami­ty in the mid-2000s took ma.gnolia.com offline, result­ing in the loss of user data. The com­pa­ny was nev­er able to recov­er from this, and ma.gnolia became famous as a case study of the need to pro­tect user data at all costs, and to make user data avail­able for down­load in the event that a com­pa­ny should go out of business.

Our responsibilities on this project

Infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture; brand design and con­sult­ing; graph­ic design; user inter­face design; CSS/XHTML tem­plate devel­op­ment. Launched 15 Feb­ru­ary 2006.