Owner Gnolia Systems Registration Optional Current status Defunct | Launched 2006 | |
Type of site Online social bookmarking | ||
Gnolia, named Ma.gnolia until 2009, was a social bookmarking web site with an emphasis on design, social features, and open standards. It is now perhaps most notable for losing members' bookmarks in a widely reported data loss incident in January 2009. It relaunched as a smaller service several months later and was ultimately shut down at the end of 2010.
Contents
Users could rate bookmarks and mark bookmarks as private. Unlike its main competitor Delicious, Ma.gnolia stored snapshots of bookmarked web pages. One feature that distinguished it from other similar web sites was the group feature, which allowed several users to share a common collection of bookmarks, managed by a selected number of group managers.
The design of the web site allowed for integration of the service into other applications via both a REST API and an API similar to the Delicious API.
Open standards
Ma.gnolia supported open standards and was often among early adopters of these standards. The bookmarking service provided support for several Microformats: In July and August 2006, among other information, support for MicroID and XFN was announced on the Ma.gnolia blog. The announcements were well received by the community around online reputation management services.
In December 2007, Ma.gnolia collaborated with Engagd to let users build attention profiles from their bookmarks. In March 2008, Ma.gnolia changed its join and sign-in pages to require users to sign up with a verified identity using OpenID. In August 2008, Ma.gnolia, among others, signed the OAuth 1.0 license.
M2 project
In August 2008, founder Larry Halff announced a ground-up rewrite of the service called M2. Parts of the new version were going to be provided under an open source license. It was planned that custom installations of Ma.gnolia can be federated with other installations or the Ma.gnolia website itself. This distributed aspect was the main difference from a similar project by Reddit.
January 2009 total data loss
Ma.gnolia servers lost all data in a complete outage on January 30, 2009. On February 17, Halff announced that due to data corruption, all user data in the database was irretrievable, rendering the site essentially dead.
Ma.gnolia's Recovery Tools allowed users to recover some data from web caches and from other feeds. However, since the tools rely on external sources to reconstruct users' data, they were limited in how much data they could restore.
Relaunch and shutdown
Halff relaunched Ma.gnolia in September 2009 with basically the same software but as a small, invitation-only service. After a request from Magnolia (CMS), it changed its name to Gnolia in October 2009.
In September 2010, Halff announced that he was shutting down Gnolia as of September 29, 2010. "Gnolia will go into read-only mode in a week on September 29, 2010. It will then remain available for bookmark exporting until at least November 30, 2010."