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 bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social ...

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 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 or REST may refer to: Relief from activity * Sleep ** Bed rest * Kneeling * Lying (position) * Sitting * Squatting position Structural support * Structural support ** Rest (cue sports) ** Armrest ** Headrest ** Footrest Arts and entert ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

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 prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definition ...

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

Microformat Microformats (μF) are a set of defined HTML classes created to serve as consistent and descriptive metadata about an element, designating it as representing a certain type of data (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, events ...

s: In July and August 2006, among other information, support for

MicroID MicroID is a decentralized identity protocol. It was originally developed in 2005 by Jeremie Millerbr> A MicroID is a simple identifier comprising a hashed communication/identity Uniform Resource Identifier, URI (e.g. email, OpenID, and/or Yadi ...

and XFN was announced on the Ma.gnolia blog. The announcements were well received by the community around

online reputation management Reputation management, originally a public relations term, refers to the Social influence, influencing, controlling, enhancing, or concealing of an individual's or group's reputation. The growth of the internet and social media led to growth of r ...

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 provider ...

. 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. T ...

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 (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images ...

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 is an open-source content management system (CMS). It is developed by Magnolia International Ltd., based in Basel, Switzerland. It is based on Content repository API for Java (JSR-283). Major releases Architecture Magnolia CMS is a ...

, 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