Ma.gnolia Goes Open Source; Wants to be the WordPress of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia is going open source, announcing plans to allow anyone to download their code and run their own version of the service under a GPL license. While the project - dubbed M2 - won’t officially launch until next month, the company is launching Ma.gnolia.org today, which includes a project charter, preliminary documentation, and a discussion group.

While more established competitor Reddit launched their own open source initiative back in June, the goals for Ma.gnolia are a bit different. Whereas Reddit’s mission is focused on having developers contribute to the core codebase, Ma.gnolia is looking to become a distributed social bookmarking service, with bloggers and publishers launching their own custom versions under their own domains.

And, while these distributed sites can be completely customized, the bookmarks users save will also feed into Ma.gnolia’s main index, making them available to search. Thus, if Mashable were to setup its own bookmarking service and you saved a link to the Tiger Woods “walking on water” video, that link would be available both here and on Ma.gnolia’s site.

Moreover, you would be able to access all of your bookmarks on Mashable, on Ma.gnolia, and through Ma.gnolia’s Facebook application. Ma.gnolia supports OpenID too, so you wouldn’t actually need to create a new account, no matter where you first sign up for the service.

In a sense, Ma.gnolia is looking to be a WordPress for social bookmarking, offering both a hosted and installable version of the service. The difference is that for a social bookmarking service to be successful, it needs scale, as a Ma.gnolia installation on a site with only a few visitors isn’t likely to gain traction.

On the other hand, it’s an interesting offering for niche publishers, as it allows their audience to share links about their given topic. With established social bookmarking services like Delicious, Digg, and Reddit commanding the lion’s share of traffic, taking a distributed approach may be the smartest play for Ma.gnolia at this point in the game. Even Microsoft is doing similar, focusing solely on tech news with their own social bookmarking service, also set to launch next month.

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