ma.gnolia had a bad stop, will it restart? and we will care about?

February 21, 2009 in on the Web
Tags: ma.gnolia, recovery, social bookmarking, web2.0

I don’t know how many of my readers are habitual users of one or more of the many social bookmarking services available out there … I am one of those and until a couple of weeks ago I’ve used del.icio.us (sorry, I’m a fan of the old “spelling”) and ma.gnolia.

For long time, in the dashboard of this blog and it’s italian brother I’ve had a couple of draft regarding the latter, which I’ve enjoyed using and also made a series of screenshots to explain the differences between ma.gnolia and del.icious regarding the community aspect of social bookmarking … some of those images are available on my Ipernity profile.

In any case now that is history since at the beginning of this february the ma.gnolia staff witnessed a massive data loss/corruption, one that – if my memory doesn’t fail me – hasn’t ever been recorded in this social, or web2.0, web era …

We users lost all of our bookmarks AND all the time spent, and the subsequent richness, of our tags and relations build between users and groups.

Since the announcement of this failure, at a regular pace, Larry Halff on the home page of http://ma.gnolia.com and in it’s GetSatisfaction section (of which probably I’ll spend a couple of words in a future post) has published a log of the recovery and a list of possible ways for the user to recovers all his data … coming to a couple of days ago when he announced that ma.gnolia itself isn’t able to provide back that data and so, if you used the service and did not share your bookmarks you do not have any way to recover them.

Personally in the last couple of years I’ve always tried to keep in sync my del.icio.us and ma.gnolia collection and I do have a weekly backup of the first on my hard-drives so I can’t tell you if the ma.gnolia’s proposed retrieval methods works and how much information can you have back aside the “clean” bookmark which, I’m repeating myself, isn’t the true value of what’s lost!

For sure the ma.gnolia service as we knew it is dead.

Larry has done also a video interview {that I still have to watch} in which he talks about the hardware problem behind this failure and of the future of this project. But how much credibility can he count on? Does he really think that users will pay him money to keep their data while he’s just lost a lot of them ?

I wish him all the best, and advice to carefully think on what kind of service he will offer in the future and to plan wisely a growth path.

Also we will have in this year 2009 to watch more closely at our data, from a privacy point of view as usual, and on how this on-line services are going to deal with them … availability, backup and so on.

Now, provided that I use happily del.icio.us, have FoxMarks installed everywhere on my PCs, are there other social bookmarking sites worth of being used ?

Keep the name’s coming in the comments, thanks!