Ma.gnolia Introduces M2: The Open Source Ma.gnolia

Ma.gnolia has announced a new initiative codenamed Ma.gnolia 2 (M2) that will be a complete rewrite of the Ma.gnolia social bookmarking service and will become an open source project where anyone who wants to host their own social bookmarking service can participate.

M2 will work by having private installations interact with a server database called the Mo.thership. The Mo.thership will allow these installations to get at the account repository and search through bookmarks. Each individual version of Ma.gnolia will be able to save their bookmarks to the server, keep up with their private bookmarks, and access the public bookmarks.

Earlier this year, popular social news service Reddit opened up their source to the public. But, as Mashable explains, Reddit's missions was "focused on having developers contribute to the core codebase" while Magnolia's mission appears to be more in line with becoming "a distributed social bookmarking service."

It should be interesting to see how this works out. Ma.gnolia is the first to admit that there could be twists in the road, but it could provide a great tool for webmasters to latch onto and provide a nice benefit for users. Privatized bookmarks that feed into a global repository could be a great enhancement to content websites if utilized correctly.

You can keep an eye on the M2 project at Ma.gnolia.org.