Starting today Nilai will begin automatically labeling bookmarks based on their URL. Some sites are dedicated to a certain type of content such as YouTube, Viddler, SimplyRecipes, Amazon, and others. If a bookmark is being saved from YouTube chances are you’ll want to label that bookmark a video. So why force people to choose the video label every time? Nilai will now do that for them. Saving clicks and time.

The current list of sites that Smart Labels will handle out-of-the-box are YouTube.com (video), Viddler.com (video), Devour.com (video), PHP.net (documentation), api.rubyonrails.org (documentation), ruby-doc.org (documentation), docs.jquery.com (documentation), codeigniter.com (documentation), CSS-Tricks.com (documentation), developer.apple.com (documentation), SimplyRecipes.com (recipe), AllRecipes (recipe), Svpply (shopping), Amazon (shopping), Fab (shopping), Zappos (shopping). And I plan to add more in the near future.

Smart Labels are also smart enough to know when you may be bookmarking a page on one of these sites that don’t fit the label. For example, if you were to bookmark Devour’s About page, Nilai will not think it is a video.

Smart Labels can be overridden. If you’d rather label bookmarks from PHP.net as research rather than documentation you may do so. In fact, every member can set up their own Smart Labels for any URLs of their choosing. (see screenshot) Simply bookmark a link, select a label, and click Add a Smart Label. All future marks from that domain will be labeled automatically. Saving you clicks and time and making Nilai’s Smart Labels feature even more useful to you.

Here are a few Smart Labels I’ve already set up for myself: Daring Fireball (Read Later), Viddler’s Developer docs (Documentation), Tweets (Read Later), Dribbble (Inspiration), and Uncrate (Shopping). This makes my life a lot easier. You may want to do the same, or, you may want to set them up completely different. Your choice.

I’m looking forward to seeing how Smart Labels evolve as Nilai’s members use them.

Smart Labels are not the only updates to Nilai that were released this week. Members can check out the changelog for the slew of updates that I’ve managed to get finished.

I’ve got a new nights and weekends project and its name is Nilai. Nilai is a simple bookmarking service and over the last few weeks I’ve been having a lot of fun working on it in my spare time. In fact, I have found it so valuable to me that it is now my homepage on my Mac, my iPad, and my iPhone.

My father was born in Bandung, Java, Indonesia so I thought it’d be cool to name the service an Indonesian word. Nilai is pronounced (as best as I can tell) Nee’-lie. It is an Indonesian word meaning mark. I think the literal translation is something more akin to “logo” but I’m taking liberty with the word a bit.

I’m building Nilai for the same reason many developers begin working on something new; to scratch my own itch. I was a Delicious user back when the URL still had a few more dots in it. I was a Magnolia user back when OpenID was still a buzzword. I have always needed a place to keep some bookmarks and easily access them later. And, while those needs are slightly different today than they were then, those services would still be useful to me today. If only they were around.

But those services, or at least the services I knew and liked at the time, are gone now. And so are many, many others. Gowalla. Brightkite. Magnolia. Friendfeed. The list of services that I once used that are now gone seems endless. And the pile keeps getting bigger.

The tipping point for me, I suppose, was watching Bret Victor’s excellent presentation Inventing on Principal. If you are someone that builds things I wholeheartedly recommend that you watch his presentation. In it he suggests finding a principal to build by. Well, I’ve found mine.

I’m going to build valuable, reliable, sustainable web services that will last forever.

Nilai is the first service I’ll be building but it won’t be the last. I have several services that I would love to use on a daily basis that I’ve all but stopped using because I’m afraid they’ll be bought out, run into the ground, or shutdown. For now I’ll keep that list under my hat and – for at least the rest of this calendar year – I’ll be working on Nilai when I can find the time.

Yes, I’m charging for Nilai right from the start. I want Nilai to still be up, running, and useful in 2022 and beyond. I hope that others will too and be willing to support that effort. It won’t be a feature-bloated service with apps on every single platform or a few hundred employees – but I think that is actually a good thing. The features that I put into Nilai will have to be valuable enough for me to want to support them for the life of the service. I’ll get more into the features I plan Nilai having in an upcoming post.

One question that will inevitably arise is that of competition. Yes, there are going to be competitors to every single service I build. And some of them will be very good. However, my thoughts on competition are much different than many. For the last 5+ years I’ve been very happily employed by Viddler. Viddler is an online video platform with competition from YouTube, Brightcove and other services both free and paid yet we continue to hire people, make money, and grow. The Internet is not a single street in which competition is so fierce that two competing services can only compete on price. Software is so nuanced that any differentiator, no matter how small, is enough to carve out a niche that makes building the service worthwhile.

If you’re looking for a large community with a huge network effect, maybe you could use the new Delicious. If you’re looking for a much more full-featured bookmarking service from the start, perhaps you could try Pinboard. I’ve never used either of these services but both seem to come recommended by their respective communities.

But I’m not trying to build Delicious or Pinboard. I’m building a bookmarking service that I would use and that I plan to use forever. I’m hoping that a few people will want to use it too and make suggestions on how it can improve along the way. If you want to help out by supporting the project and by making suggestions; sign up to Nilai and tell someone else about it too.

However, I was never really able to keep a good stride with del.icio.us because beyond the way that I used it, the service never really felt very social or usable to me. I’ve heard the creator of del.icio.us say during a speech that a huge portion of del.icio.us’ bandwidth was eaten up by feed subscriptions rather than visitor traffic. Which is exactly the problem that I have with del.icio.us for my own purposes! It does everything that I want it to do, and then some, but it doesn’t feel good and I don’t want to go there.

Me & the ma.gnolia card.

Enter ma.gnolia.com. A gorgeous, feature-rich, friendly, and social service that does everything that del.icio.us does – but it makes you feel like your driving a Porche while doing it. To top it off ma.gnolia lends itself to proper usage which I think is a huge undertaking when creating social services.

Before I go on with my showering of word sugar on ma.gnolia – let me tell you why I switched in the first place.

While in Austin, Texas for SXSW this past March – I met up with Larry Halff founder of ma.gnolia. The first time I met Larry was at a lunch about openID and he ended up treating everyone to that lunch and left before myself or anyone could thank him. Later on that night I caught up with him at one of the many after-parties and made it a point to thank him for taking care of the bill. After we got to talking about all types of subjects I began to tell him how I had never switched to ma.gnolia because I felt that del.icio.us had done everything that I wanted with my social bookmarks.

This is when it happened. This is when Larry, who could have went all marketing on me or even put up his nose at the fact that I even used del.icio.us, answered the following question: “If you only had 30-seconds to tell me about one feature of mag.nolia – what would it be?”

“Thanks. We have a feature called “thanks” that allows you to thank someone for a bookmark. It doesn’t show publicly. It doesn’t make that bookmark or that person go higher on any type of graph or scale, it is just a way to quickly say “thanks”.”

The above is me quoting Larry very loosely as he and I had already had a few drinks at this point. My response? “That’s pretty cool. Ok, when I get home I am going to switch to ma.gnolia and then write a post about my thoughts on it.”.

Now to continue with the shower of word sugar. Ma.gnolia is much nicer than any other social bookmarking site that I’ve tried. Not only aesthetically but also in its usability, its simple and social features, and also its customer service. I picked the worst day to switch to ma.gnolia too. They had just done a version upgrade of their system, and I switched directly in the middle of it. Of course there were some bugs that occurred due to me switching to a cutting-edge version of the site – but Larry and his staff squashed the bugs, responded to support questions, and even fixed some things I didn’t like very quickly.

I’ve now been using it for a few days and I’ve finally been able to hit a stride with a social bookmarking site. Ma.gnolia makes me want to add good content as well as fill in good context for each bookmark I add. I’m almost approaching it more like a blog than just a bookmarking site – since I do not bookmark things only for myself – but for the social network I’ve built on ma.gnolia.

Key features

I simply have to fill you in on what I’ve found to be some of ma.gnolia’s key features. If you are a user of ma.gnolia – and you feel I’ve missed some – please be sure to let me know in the comments.

• The “thanks” feature is as good as I imagined when Larry first told me about it. Simple, private, perfect.
• The fact that every bookmark has a permalink per user so that each user can add their own specific details to it is awesome. It is like social tagging++.
• Ma.gnolia also automatically creates “Short links” for each bookmark giving you an automated TinyURL type service for every bookmark you add. Genius.

The service also takes a screenshot of the domain the URL comes from so that at a quick glance you can see the web page that you bookmarked.

• Although I’ve not had a chance to fully explore the groups on ma.gnolia, I can see from the way others are using them that I will also find them useful. Groups seems like a great way to hold discussions, bookmark resource material, and generally converse with those inside of the group.
• The support and tools section gives great documentation on how you can consume data from ma.gnolia as well as giving you great ways to use the service above and beyond what is available at the site. Currently I’m using one of the bookmarklets to post to ma.gnolia.

There are many others and I could go on but suffice to say; I’m hooked. If you use ma.gnolia be sure to add me as a contact by visiting my profile or you can reach me and other great ma.gnolia users through the featured members page. I’ve also got my latest few bookmarks popping up in the sidebar on my homepage (which is extremely easy to do). If you are not a ma.gnolia user – sign up, import your bookmarks from pretty much any other service and use it for a few days. I’m sure you’ll like it as much as I do.

Thanks to Larry and his team for putting together a great service and to Alex Hillman for encouraging me to switch in the first place.

[tags]ma.gnolia, sxsw, larry halff, social, bookmarking, review[/tags]
[slug]sweet-magnolia[/slug]