Rubénerd Blog :)

Magnolia is a similar social bookmarking site to del.icio.us with one important difference: Magnolia isn’t being bought by Microsoft! I love del.icio.us and have been a loyal user ever since I heard about the service on The Gillmor Gang in 2004, but Microsoft’s threat to buy Yahoo means I need to say goodbye.

My del.icio.us bookmarks page

The first step is exporting your years of accumulated links from del.icio.us. From your home screen, click Settings, then under the Bookmarks heading click Export / Backup. You’ll be given the option to export all your data as HTML which you’ll save to your local drive.

The del.icio.us export page

Once you have this HTML file, you can register for a Magnolia account and import your data. From your Magnolia profile page, click Help and choose Import from del.icio.us from the popup menu. From there you browse for the exported del.icio.us file and Magnolia will begin importing. My links took just under 5 minutes to import.

The Magnolia import screen

After you’ve got all your links in, you’ll want to add the Mark in Magnolia bookmarklet to your browser bookmark bar. It works in the exact same way as the post to del.icio.us link you probably used. The Bookmarklets link is also in the Help menu.

And there you have it, not really that hard at all.

My Magnolia bookmarks page

It’s ironic that one of the features that drew me to del.icio.us in the first place (easy data export) was the one feature I was hoping I would never have to use. I’ll stick to using both for now, but it’s good to know I have a backup plan if Microsoft does end up getting their hands on it.

Since time began we’ve been told that Microsoft was considering buying Yahoo (or maybe it just seems like it!). We all shrugged it off time and time again and laughed about it. Now it seems for the first time that it might actually happen! From Microsoft:

Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share

Transaction valued at approximately $44.6 billion in cash and stock; provides 62 percent premium to current trading price for Yahoo! shareholders; combined entity to create a more competitive company, providing superior value to shareholders, better choice and innovation for customers and partners

So the next step is to research alternatives and CLOSE ALL MY YAHOO ACCOUNTS!

del.icio.us is easily replaced by Ma.gnolia. If you use the backup/export feature in del.icio.us and import that file into Ma.gnolia all your bookmarks and their tags are preserved!

Flickr is more of a problem. It doesn’t have an easy export function, and transferring images and their tags one by one could take a VERY long time! Zooomr is probably the closest equivalent, but the last time I tried to use it I ended up going back because of reliability problems… plus the thought of all the material I already had on Flickr kept me in my place!

Guess I’ll be researching mass Flickr exporters or backing up tools. I have copies of all the photos, but thinking about all those tags and albums… I don’t want to replace del.icio.us and Flickr, I really like using them and have so for a long time!

Let’s just hope that Microsoft doesn’t buy IAC Search and Media (aka Ask.com), I just couldn’t bring myself to replace my Bloglines account!