It’s been hard to know when or what to write on the story of Ma.gnolia’s collapse. Although the database corruption manifested itself quite suddenly (Larry, Ma.gnolia’s founder, was actually visiting here in Vancouver at the time) but the full scenario unfolded over the course of a couple weeks. It took that time to get some recovery tools in place, and especially to find out if drive recovery experts could, well, recover the database.

Today the word came back that the drive held no recoverable data, and Larry updated the homepage to break the news. This came a few days after he and Chris Messina used the forum of their Citizen Garden podcast to share more details about the technical aspects behind the breakdown, and the prospects for Ma.gnolia’s future.

It’s troubling to see something I’ve played a part in slip away into the unforgiving ether, or as Chris called it, ’where data goes when it dies.’ But it’s worse to see a friend go through something so harsh, having known how hard Larry worked building the service. As the product manager for most of the service’s life, I feel responsible for not having pushed for comprehensive recovery plans. In the hurly burly of daily operations, and the designing space I occupied on the M2 project for the last months of my time with Ma.gnolia, these things fall out of view, but it boils down to riding on unchecked assumptions.

Community Responses

While private reflections and conversations had tough moments, the strongest emotions came through in the reactions, which cover the full range. On Twitter, reactions boiled down to expressions of surprise from many, support from many, and some snarky comments in there as well, especially immediately after the news broke. In blogs, thoughtfulness and forgiving tones won the day, which says something about the dynamic between the tools we use to create content, and the tone of content we create with a given tool.

The roughest ride came at Get Satisfaction, where Ma.gnolia had an established support space for well over a year. There, two hell-bent griefers repeatedly put the spotlight on Larry and tried to rile readers into an online-pillorying, at times in rather personal terms. Being upset and expressing it is human; piling on with post after post is griefing. While that negativity took a great deal of attention and energy out of the thread, it ended up being in the minority, and scores of people chimed in to express understanding, support and offers of help. In short, the majority of people responding were people at their best.

Community managers should take note of how Larry handled the activity at Get Satisfaction. By opening up on the subject in a third-party forum, he took criticism on the chin. With griefers, Larry acknowledged their anger, but refused to engage as they dug further into attack mode, and didn’t move to have their posts removed. These aren’t easy things to do, but I believe strongly in this approach, because it gives negativity room to spin itself out and for others to see that the target is able to hear that criticism without being consumed by it.

Anti-Cloud: 1; Pro-Cloud: .75

Today, Larry heard back that the database cannot be recovered from the corrupted hard-drive by any means. Though this was known to be a long-shot, it’s still sad news. Almost immediately after the service went offline, some commented that the event would sober enthusiasm for cloud computing, where we leave our data on any number of web services rather than a single computer or network.

There’s no clear winner in that argument. It’s true that many bookmarks were lost for members without backups in mirroring to another service or doing manual exports. But Larry was also able to assemble, with help from some community members, tools that pull bookmarks from the caches of search engines and other services where members had syndicated their Ma.gnolia bookmarks. I was able to recover about 75% of my own bookmarks, showing that the cloud itself can be more resilient than any one service. The cloud that taketh away, can also give back, though at a price. The web keeps showing that the whole is more than any assembly of individual players, and it’s kind of appropriate as that was truly the case with Ma.gnolia’s community.

Through links, people had found others of like interest and heart, and shared that with the world as part of who they are. It was never one person I liked more than others there, but the collection of people I knew that made it worthwhile. That’s not a small thing, but it is something that can be rebuilt, even from scratch.

Larry does say in the podcast that he has his eye on rebuilding the service in a few months, albeit with some substantial twists, including a private or invitation-only member acquisition model. Should that happen, I’d bring my links back in a heartbeat. After all, magnolias bloom every spring.