Misfortune at Ma.gnolia

Today I logged onto Ma.gnolia to bookmark websites for my assignment that I could later share with my classmates only to find that the service was no longer available. It turned out that Ma.gnolia was going through a nightmare due to “data corruption and loss.”

The founder of Ma.gnolia, Larry Halff, posted this note on the homepage:

Dear Ma.gnolia Community Member or Visitor,

Early on the West-coast morning of Friday, January 30th, Ma.gnolia experienced every web service’s worst nightmare: data corruption and loss. For Ma.gnolia, this means that the service is offline and members’ bookmarks are unavailable, both through the website itself and the API. As I evaluate recovery options, I can’t provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours.

I will of course keep you appraised here and in our Twitter account.

Most importantly, I apologize to all of you who have made Ma.gnolia a home for your bookmarks and community. I know that many of you rely on Ma.gnolia in your day to day work and play to safely host you bookmarks, keeping them available around the clock, and that this is a difficult disruption.

Sincerely,
Larry

As a Ma.gnolia member, I’m at a loss. Despite the fact that I have a Del.icious account,  Ma.gnolia was always my go to social bookmarking site.

I hope they figure out what went wrong and are able to come back online.

In the meantime, what social bookmarking site do you recommend?

February 17, 2009 Update
The database file recovery has been unsuccessful; as a result, members should use the the public bookmark recovery tools for recovering their bookmark collections that were once stored on the Ma.gnolia database. For more updates, go to Ma.gnolia.com.

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7 Comments

  • susan February 3, 2009 at 4:10 am

    I am getting into stumbleupon and I like Kirtsy.

    • Stephanie Gulley February 3, 2009 at 7:21 am

      @Susan: I’ve used StumbleUpon before mostly as a way to discover new websites and not much of a social bookmarking tool. What do you enjoy most about StumbleUpon & Kirtsy?

  • Joseph Dunphy February 6, 2009 at 5:23 am

    Ms. Gulley:

    I can’t speak for Susan, of course, but I’ve gotten into Stumbleupon myself, and I can say what I’ve like about it and why I use it instead of delicious.

    Stumbleupon offers more of a blogging platform, with larger character limits for posts, along with a limited use of html, enough to allow the embedding of images and links into text. This isn’t as much functionality as is offered by most blogging platforms, but it is enough to allow one to discuss the sites one bookmarks and not just point people toward them. In fact, one can discuss them at length, just by linking the end of one post to the beginning of another, if one so pleases, or by taking the discussion onto another site, if one so wishes.

    One is stuck with a very limited set of templates and few customisation options, but one can get past the plain text look of del.icio.us and simpy, and create something much more presentable. While I’d like to see more functionality, what functionality is present lifts Stumbleupon into an entirely different category.

    Downside: Stumbletrolls are as bad as is often alleged, and the company does little to keep them under control. However, these trolls don’t seem to wander much, so as long as you avoid the forums, they’ll probably never bother you. One doesn’t really need to use them to socialise on the site, anyway – just wander the review pages for the sites you like, find somebody whose blog looks promising, sign up as one of their “fans” and you’re on your way to making a connection. That’s how I found my contacts, or rather, in most cases, how they found me.

    • Stephanie Gulley February 6, 2009 at 5:49 am

      @Joseph Dunphy, thank you so much for your review of StumbleUpon! I wasn’t aware of all of the new features that StumbleUpon offers to its members. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve only used StumbleUpon to discover new websites and rank them so others interested in the same topics as me could enjoy them as well. In fact, my profile is all stock and definitely not presentable compared to your profile. 🙂

      You’ve definitely opened up my eyes and have me rethinking the benefits of StumbleUpon. Thanks again for sharing that information with us.

  • Mike Avila February 8, 2009 at 2:49 pm
    • Stephanie Gulley February 8, 2009 at 10:11 pm

      @Mike Avila, I saw Larry’s recommendation of Diigo on the Ma.gnolia site and checked it out yesterday. It was easy to install and transferring my bookmarks from Del.icious wasn’t difficult. I did experience one bug – I couldn’t update my avatar. Going to test it out some more this week to see how well it performs.

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