About

Markola is a web application for saving and organizing bookmarks. It's meant for knowledge workers and creatives who need to keep things organized with a simple, easy-to-understand tool that they can trust.

By trust, we mean it can be trusted to behave in a way that's predictable and to be around ten years from now.

Its development goals can be thought of in terms of the question, "If we were to build Delicious in 2025, what would that look like?"

There are certain things we're opinionated about that feed into this, based on the history of the SaaS industry in general and web applications for storing and organizing bookmarks in particular. You could say our approach is decidedly small-tech or medium-tech rather than big-tech.

Here are a few things we value:

  1. A working, cohesive whole. As a technology proving ground. By building and operating something simple but non-trivial, we can adopt and deploy technologies while assessing them for suitability and cutting through any fleeting industry hype.
  2. Mobile friendly. While our optimal workflow as knowledge workers is on desktops and laptops, being able to consume and create on mobile is undeniable now.
  3. Pragmatic adoption and deployment of AI. We accelerate development by working with LLMs, but review final code before it gets pushed. We also embrace AI's ability to accelerate workflows by reducing unwelcome cognitive load, such as coming up with an initial set of tags to categorize one's bookmarks.
  4. High information density. We aim for high information density. We know this is counter to modern design trends, but we're building a tool for those like ourselves who know what they're doing and are trying to get things done.
  5. Sustainable business models with incentives for high quality product. We've seen what happens to useful little tools like bookmark apps when big money gets involved. That's why we run lean and pragmatic, and why we plan to charge for subscriptions. Our success being tied more directly to happy users is a desirable steady end state.

What else are we forgetting? Oh yeah, Markola is built with Ruby on Rails.