Bookmarking service Magnolia opens up its source to all

Magnolia’s Larry Halff (right) and Citizen Agency’s Tara Hunt announce plans to open up the social-bookmarking service in the coming months. To see the whole presentation click the credit link below.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Daniel Terdiman)

On Friday social-bookmarking service Magnolia announced plans to open up its source code to let anyone add its bookmarking functionality to their site or private organization.

To cut through some of the tech talk it’s akin to WordPress.com offering WordPress.org, a downloadable version that can be hosted on the user’s own servers . More importantly, the project should help speed up the development of both the hosted and user-installed iterations of the service by tapping into a community of avid developers.

Some of the things to look forward to in this next version include:

A new stream view that shows you the freshest bookmarks of people you’re friends with on one single page.
Support for both OAuth and OpenID, with the latter making it easier for people to sign into hosted builds of Magnolia.
Sidebar customization
Theming

The open-source version won’t be available to developers until sometime in September, with a beta version (read: consumer friendly) on track for December and into the first part of 2009. In the meantime, if you’re a developer looking to get your mitts on the code it will be made available here.