Ma.gnolia 2 was launched at Gnomedex2008 in August 2008, so it's something that has been in the works for a while. Here's the video of his presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0P6cTPS8_4
Maybe a good idea, but they used Comic Sans for the description and that is the sign of amateur. After they lost all of their own data, I really would never trust anything with these people ever again.
This is exactly what Comic Sans was made for: a brief blurb of text that's meant to look playful rather than formal. Comic Sans actually works better than Chalkboard for that purpose.
Comic Sans is hated because it's overused, but don't take from that that there are no good uses. There is only one.
I presume that is exactly the point. If it becomes an open, federated, distributed, open source, social bookmarking (any more buzz words?) service, you don't have to trust them with anything. Really, that is possibly the only way they could ever recover any semblance of trust.
I don't think that you should reason too much from the font somebody uses. Plenty of successful websites started out with an amateurish look and for some of them it's still a trademark.
Or Digg, Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon, Furl, Blinklist, Bluedot, Newsvine, Mister-wong, Mixx, Buddymarks, Jumptags, Google/Yahoo bookmarks, or 100s of others. Here's a big list: http://www.socialposter.com
For some reason, magnolia always resonated with me as: "Hey! Look at me! I'm sooooo easy to use! And I look sooooo good! Hey! (bats eyelashes) I'm pretty, right? Your life should revolve around bookmarking! Just go to mag.nol.ia .. no, wait, mag.nolia.com ? No, it's ma.gnol.ia. Ah, here it is: ma.gnolia.com. Anyway, bookmark it!"
