Gnolia, named Ma.gnolia until 2009, was a

social bookmarking Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share Internet bookmark, bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious (website), Delicious, founded i ...

web site with an emphasis on design, social features, and open standards. In January 2009, Gnolia lost members' bookmarks in a widely reported

data loss Data loss is an error condition in information systems in which information is destroyed by failures (like failed spindle motors or head crashes on hard drives) or neglect (like mishandling, careless handling or storage under unsuitable conditions) ...

incident. It relaunched as a smaller service several months later and was ultimately shut down 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 (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

and an API similar to the Delicious API.

Open standards

Ma.gnolia supported

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to ...

s and was often among early adopters of these standards. The bookmarking service provided support for several

Microformat Microformats (μF) are predefined HTML markup (like HTML classes) created to serve as descriptive and consistent metadata about elements, designating them as representing a certain type of data (such as contact information, geographic coor ...

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 OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provi ...

. In August 2008, Ma.gnolia, among others, signed the

OAuth OAuth (short for open authorization) is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords. Th ...

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 Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...

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 Data corruption refers to errors in computer data that occur during writing, reading, storage, transmission, or processing, which introduce unintended changes to the original data. Computer, transmission, and storage systems use a number of meas ...

, 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."

References

{{Reflist Social bookmarking Internet services supporting OpenID Domain hacks