Mi.gration

I’ve used del.icio.us for quite a while now. I’m storing 1159 bookmarks, each one of them tagged. It works just fine but it also feels a little, I don’t know …stale. There is supposedly a redesign in the works but I’m not sure that I want to wait around any longer to find out if they’re finally going to put some microformats in the markup.

Instead, I’m moving over to Magnolia. I’ve had a Magnolia account for years but I’ve never really used it. I didn’t see the point while I had a del.icio.us account. But whereas de.icio.us appears stagnated, Magnolia seems to be constantly innovating. Also, it uses microformats. There’s also the fact that I know Larry and I’ve briefly met Todd (lovely gents, both) but I don’t know Joshua Schachter. That shouldn’t matter but it kind of does.

Moving from del.icio.us to Magnolia is very straightforward. But that alone wasn’t going to be enough for me. I’m also accessing my del.icio.us bookmarks through the API. It turns out that Magnolia provides an ingenious way to ease my pain. As well as providing their own fully-featured API, Magnolia also provides a mirror of the infamously sucky del.icio.us API. All I had to do was change some URL endpoints and I had Adactio Elsewhere switched over in no time. Other services take note: providing mirrored versions of your competitors’ APIs eases the pain of migration.

I’ve updated my feedburner RSS feed to point it at my Magnolia links instead of my del.ious.us links. If you were subscribed to my del.icio.us feed separately, you’ll probably want to update your feedreader to point to my Magnolia links instead.

It remains to be seen whether I’ll stay at Magnolia. Even though it is functionally and cosmetically superior to del.icio.us, that might not be enough. After all, Jaiku is superior to Twitter in almost every way—design,markup, reliability—but Twitter still wins. That’s mostly because that’s where all my friends are. Right now my bookmarking friends are split fairly evenly between del.icio.us and Magnolia. Then again, I’ve never really made much use of the “social” part of “social bookmarking”.

So who knows? Maybe I’ll end up moving back to del.icio.us at some stage. It’s reassuring to know that moving my data around between these services is pretty straightforward: I can export from Magnolia and import into del.icio.us any time I want.