Ma.gnolia shut down two months too soon (old delicious competitor) | Hacker News Reader

Ma.gnolia shut down two months too soon (old delicious competitor)

gnolia.com

58 pointsjaxn33 comments

Hello, hackers, look at your bookmarking service, now back to me, now back at your bookmarks, now back to me.

Sadly, your bookmarking service is not me, but if he didn't keep shutting off his service, then he could be like me.

Look down, back up, where are you? You don't have any bookmarks.

I love you

Expressions of emotions without context are frowned upon by the HN community. A grey metallic voice of iron reason backed by intricate developer knowledge is the idyllic comment. This is done to reduce comment noise, but it is inhuman. I too thought this comment was enjoyable, but I cannot express this sentiment beyond an upvote without risking the wrath of communal punishment.

I love you (in a rational ironic way)

I must be one of the only people who doesn't get these references, and doesn't care.

It's in reference to a commercial that was particularly well done, especially in scene changes without jump cuts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE

What's really amazing is the once-in-a-blue moon of (admittedly, excellent) satire reaching the top of the post rankings.

This is one of my biggest fears of cloud computing.

With abandonware, you can still run it locally, years after the death of the company that produced it. Not so with a thin client or SaaS.

EDIT: This isn't about exporting data, I actually like certain software tools, and would miss them if I no longer had access to an install.

Choose services that clearly and easily allow you to export all of your data whenever you want. delicious makes export trivial, so there's not much lock-in. Look at how many competitors already support importing delicious files.

I don't know if there is much to fear; if the service doesn't have an export service, treat it like you expect to lose your data at some point, as you would your data stored on a hard drive with no backup copy. Any hacker with his salt can not be blind-sided by losing all his data to a service, because it didn't let him export the data safely.

Of course, sometimes you reach a grey area where some parts are exportable, but not others. Take Bloglines, the RSS reader, which allowed me to export my subscriptions as XML/OPML, but didn't save my starred entries. Of course, you could argue that this wasn't their fault, seeing as there probably wasn't any standard to support the export. Nevertheless, it turned out to be something that would bite me in the ass, when Bloglines (initially) went belly up.

I think we've reach a point long ago where we found out that there's a tangible chance of losing our data stored in the cloud. This is not a new "cause for alarm" or anything of the sort. We're basically at "fool me thrice" at this point.

What about losing the tool itself, never mind the data?

Any tool that's worth your money will have competitors. Sooner or later.

A vacuum of users who suddenly need a new service to shovel their money at will be quickly filled by the market.

I'm not sure anyone who's spent their entire life programming in Emacs would take that well.

"Oh, yeah. Just get used to it. Notepad++ is so much more modern."

They'll move the Vim and then have the epiphany of realizing they where wrong all this time. Hopefully before their left hand becomes this unusable and RSI ridden extension of the rest of thier arm. Being serious, I think it's insulting to mention Notepad++ as a replacement for Emacs instead of a more capable editor! ;)

Maybe it's just me, but N++ seems to have far fewer abilities, extensions, etc than Vim or Emacs; and what's there is buggier and hasn't been fixed in years. It seems to be dying slowly and reluctantly. It's a very basic text editor with a few neat tricks and a lower learning curve, and that's about it.

Try a modern editor. Like vim, emacs, or textmate/e-texteditor, and look into what people have built for them. Then tell me you think N++ is more capable.

edit: bah! misreading sucks. delete that last line. Now I need a time machine :\

That's what I said bro. I'm a Vim user myself (and have been for a year too many) and I think it's the best thing since hot chocolate bread. I just used a semi complicated macro to edit 800 lines of a CVS document, which took me around 3 minutes to record, but saved me hours of work I would have had to spend manually doing most of it in Textmate (which I think is a really good editor, just not in the same league as Vim or Emacs) or any other modern editor for that matter.

As a Vim user I feel compelled to mix a shameless plug for my editor of choice in a conversation every time the topic shows it's head. Anyway, I think you misread my comment. I love Vim and I don't even run Windows (to run Notepad++).

Gerblagh, you're entirely right, my mistake.

Must be the finals-studying. I think my brain is going mushy.

Here's the dilemma in a slightly different context.

I -love- the game Master of Orion II. Every few months I dust it off and spend an entire weekend on it. Because I control the software, I can continue to enjoy it 13 years after the developer folded.

I built a Facebook game a few years back. The company that owns it decided to shut it down. I get messages -every day- from people who are dying to play again. But there's nothing they can do, they don't control the software.

> I built a Facebook game a few years back. The company that owns it decided to shut it down. I get messages -every day- from people who are dying to play again. But there's nothing they can do, they don't control the software.

Did you retain any rights, such that you could white-label and de-facebook-ize it, and stick it up on a webpage?

That's pretty unusual in contracted work. The customer would (not without reason) fear that you'd get them to pay for development and then just go ahead and rebrand it as a competing service. I generally try to retain rights on anything but "business logic" and UI but won't push very hard for it unless I'm going to be re-using my own code in the project.

It'd be interesting to have a clause stipulating that if the customer shuts down their instance of your code permanently, you reserve the right to start up your own. Do you think anyone could get away with that?

The only solution is using cloud-sites which open their source and so allow instant duplication.

Honestly, up-voting articles on HN is my bookmarking service. My work bookmarks stay on my work computer and my home ones stay at home. HN posts are really the only thing I reference from both places sometimes.

I just learned the other day that we can see the posts we upvoted via our profile.

My HN "saved" list is about 6000 items long at this stage, which makes it somewhat unwieldy. Are there any 3rd party tools/services for scraping it and allowing searches?

I have to say that the upvote list does cover almost all the stuff in the overlap between my interests and the HN collective interest. But surely everyone is interested in something else not covered by HN.

honestly, i never quite saw the appeal of bookmarking services. most of them, at least. i tried a few, all too much hassle.

I've never used one for anything. I think part of the appeal was that it worked something like Digg or Reddit - the social aspect.

Without the appeal of seeing what other people have bookmarked, it would work just as well to maintain my own list on an HTTP server. Then I can access it from anywhere just the same.

Before native bookmark sync, it was my way of ensuring I knew how to get to all the same places on multiple computers.

Also, the 'suggested tags' feature worked really well most of the time, which was awesome, because I otherwise would have never taken the time to tag my bookmarks.

What is the meaning of this post title? 2 months too soon? I don't get it.

I suppose the author was implying that if Gnolia had held on until the announcement of Delicious's closure, that would have given it a push to keep going, take on some refugees.

Oh thanks, I get it now.

Except for the fact that no one in their right mind would use Magnolia after its first incarnation lost all user data, and didn't have any backups.

People have also recommended http://pinboard.in/ - Havent tried it myself.

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