Ma.gnolia
Encyclopedia
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 shutdown at the end of 2010.
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.
s and was often among early adopters of these standards. The bookmarking service provided support for several Microformat
s: 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.
.
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.
, 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."
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....
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 shutdown at the end of 2010.
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
Rest
Rest may refer to:* Leisure* Human relaxation* SleepRest may also refer to:* Rest , a pause in a piece of music* Rest , the relation between two observers* Rest , a 2008 album by Gregor Samsa...
API and an API similar to the Delicious API.
Open standards
Ma.gnolia supported open standardOpen standard
An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed . There is no single definition and interpretations vary with usage....
s and was often among early adopters of these standards. The bookmarking service provided support for several Microformat
Microformat
A microformat is a web-based approach to semantic markup which seeks to re-use existing HTML/XHTML tags to convey metadata and other attributes in web pages and other contexts that support HTML, such as RSS...
s: In July and August 2006, among other information, support for MicroID
MicroID
MicroID is a decentralized identity protocol. It was originally developed in 2005 by Jeremie Miller . A MicroID is a simple identifier comprising a hashed communication/identity URI and claimed URL...
and XFN
XHTML Friends Network
XHTML Friends Network is an HTML microformat developed by Global Multimedia Protocols Group that provides a simple way to represent human relationships using links. XFN enables web authors to indicate relationships to the people in their blogrolls by adding one or more keywords as the rel...
was announced on the Ma.gnolia blog. The announcements were well received by the community around online reputation management
Online reputation management
Online reputation management is the practice of monitoring the Internet reputation of a person, brand or business, with the goal of suppressing negative mentions entirely, or pushing them lower on search engine results pages to decrease their visibility...
services.
In December 2007, Ma.gnolia collaborated with Engagd to let users build attention profiles
APML
APML is an XML-based format for expressing a person's interests and dislikes.-Overview:APML allows people to share their own personal attention profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between news readers...
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
OpenID
OpenID is an open standard that describes how users can be authenticated in a decentralized manner, eliminating the need for services to provide their own ad hoc systems and allowing users to consolidate their digital identities...
. In August 2008, Ma.gnolia, among others, signed the OAuth
OAuth
OAuth is an open standard for authorization. It allows users to share their private resources stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their credentials, typically username and password.OAuth allows users to hand out tokens instead of credentials to their data hosted by a...
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 RedditReddit
reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...
.
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)Magnolia (CMS)
Magnolia is an Open-Source content management system developed by Magnolia International Ltd., based in Basel, Switzerland. It is based on JSR-170.-History:...
, 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."