Webware

Social-bookmarking service Magnolia is in deep trouble. Founder Larry Halff, who has been keeping users up-to-date on progress being made on restoring the company's database server, which suffered from file system corruption last week, said in a blog post on Thursday that he believes that he let the Magnolia community and himself down by using a single backup for the site's data. The company's backup server also suffered from file corruption, leaving the entire site down and all its data unrecoverable.

In the blog post, Halff said he is "currently working with a data recovery company in hopes that (it) can recover a working version of the database." Unfortunately, neither he nor the company is sure if the lost data is recoverable, but he expects an update "as late as next week."

Online-chat application Meebo has added Facebook chat back to its service, the company's chief executive, Seth Sternberg, announced Thursday. According to Sternberg, Meebo is "now the first launch partner of the 'alpha' version of the Facebook Connect plus Chat integration."

In order to connect to Facebook chat through Meebo, users will need to log in to Facebook from the Meebo front page and add Facebook as a network account in the Meebo menu.

Tree.com, a company that owns a number of online properties in the personal-finance sector, announced on Friday that it has acquired personal-finance service Thrive from Loudwater Labs. Although Tree.com is a publicly traded company, the terms of the deal were not disclosed because it did not have a material impact on its financial statements. Thrive will remain an independent entity after the acquisition.

eHire, an online job-matching community, announced on Friday that it will officially launch its service on March 1. According to the company, its technology will allow prospective employees to create profiles containing their resume and qualifications.

Employers can sign up for the site and find qualified candidates by using the company's "matching engine" and scoring mechanism, which use algorithms to determine which candidates may be a good fit for an opening. The company plans to generate revenue from both the candidates and the employers by charging them subscription costs and success-only fees, respectively.

Social bookmarking site Magnolia, which suffered an extensive data loss last week, has posted a new update that says attempts at restoring user data have been unsuccessful. The site continues to be offline while repairs are made--a process Magnolia founder Larry Haff tells us is still ongoing.

Since last week he's been in touch with a handful of other services that might be able to do something with the data that's left. One of those places is Diigo, where Haff is encouraging users to begin a "new collection."

Haff is also pointing users toward tools that, for some, will let them grab a portion of their bookmarks for safe keeping. Magnolia users who are also using FriendFeed can pull in previously bookmarked pages using an officially sanctioned tool that crawls that RSS feed and spits out a stream of bookmarks. However, the tool does not pull in tags or descriptions that were created by users. It also will only go so far back as to when the user had signed up with FriendFeed, a service which is a little over a year old.

A second option that's not nearly as automated as the FriendFeed tool, but can go back further is Web caching. User pages that were picked up by Google and Archive.org can let users view their bookmarks pages and copy over links they had saved. These caches have the added benefit of the tags and descriptions--the two things the FriendFeed tool can't grab. Missing, however, is the option to take the cache and turn it into a quick RSS feed, which would make it simpler to import into another service.

Another side effect of the outage is that paying premium members of the service are being refunded their money in the next two weeks. The two levels of premium membership, which cost $8 and $25 a year respectively, removed ads from Magnolia's bookmark pages and groups. Assuming the site comes back if the data is eventually restored, users might be able to sign up for the service yet again.

As of Friday morning, technology news site Red Herring, widget start page service Pageflakes, and social bookmarking site Magnolia were all unavailable. But it appears all three will be back up and running.

Eventually.

As for Red Herring's outage, Silicon Valley Insider is reporting (via a Tweet from a former RH employee) that it's closing its doors. However, a source close to the company tell us that Red Herring simply has not paid its hosting bill, and that no employees have been informed otherwise.

In Pageflakes' case the site began experiencing problems early Thursday, which coincided with several other sites from parent company LiveUniverse going down. These sites, including LiveVideo, MeeVee, and Revver are all currently offline (which in Revver's case appears to happen a lot).

We contacted Live Universe founder and CEO Brad Greenspan about it, who says the downtime is simply a part of migration to a new data center in Los Angeles that has "lots of servers." Greenspan also said that the sites should be back up in the next few hours.

For Magnolia, the prognosis is a little more grim. Early Friday, the social-bookmarking site experienced data corruption and loss, which the company says will take "weeks" to sort out. In the meantime, the service has shuttered its Web front-end and closed external access to its APIs while its database is re-organized. It should be noted, however, that the outage does not affect development on the company's open-sourced project, "M2" which opens up the site for other people to add new features and fix bugs.

The one positive thing to come out of this is learning about the execution of downtime. Magnolia was the only one of these three sites (or more if you're counting Revver and LiveVideo) that put up a notice to its users to tell them what was going on. In many cases, this keeps panic at a low, and more importantly--does not make people think you're shutting down and taking their data or content with you. There is of course a third way to do it if you are actually running out of money: hibernate.

I'm as guilty as the next person for having a social network portfolio that's too big. Aside from my Twitter account, I belong to Plurk and Identi.ca, and although I use Facebook most often, I still have MySpace and Hi5 accounts.

But now that 2008 has passed and it's time for us to evaluate what we did last year and try to improve upon that for 2009, why don't we start by cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that we like best in each category? After all, spending more time on multiple services isn't nearly as rewarding as getting more quality time with the best services, right?

Social bookmarking keeper: Delicious

Social bookmarking services are extremely handy when you want to remember a site at a later time, but that doesn't mean they're all created equal. In fact, Delicious, the leader in the space, easily sets itself apart from competitors like Ma.gnolia, Diigo, and ZigTag by boasting a better interface, more users, and better tagging, which makes it easier to find and share bookmarks.

Although Diigo's highlighting options are useful, ZigTag's semantic technology tries to improve bookmarking, and Ma.gnolia aims at providing a more thorough solution, none compare to Delicious. Yahoo's social-bookmarking service now features a streamlined search function, which makes finding bookmarks simple, and its new design makes it the most intuitive social-bookmarking service on the Web. But Delicious' most useful offering--its Firefox add-on--has nothing to do with the site at all. By installing the Delicious add-on, users can tag pages on-the-fly without being forced to visit the Delicious homepage. Granted, its competitors have Firefox add-ons as well, but after using each, it quickly becomes clear that they simply don't work as well as the Delicious tool.

Taking all that into account, I simply don't know why it's worth using another service besides Delicious. It's a superior tool with more convenient options, offering the same basic functionality as its competitors. It's the cream of the social-bookmarking crop.

Micro-blogging keeper: Twitter

I'll be the first to admit that I complain about Twitter as much as the next person, but after using competing services like Identi.ca, Jaiku, and Plurk, it's not hard to figure out that it's the only worthwhile micro-blogging tool.

Granted, Twitter still doesn't offer groups and I wish it had an element of open source like Identi.ca, but the sheer number of users who comment each day on Twitter makes it the best choice for your social-networking portfolio. If you want to be a part of a community that's both lively and engaging, you won't find it anywhere else but on Twitter. And now that it's more reliable and the Fail Whale is an occasional annoyance instead of a daily occurrence, Twitter has become an even more compelling service.

As the best place to find friends, colleagues, and thought-leaders in any industry, Twitter is the obvious choice as the only micro-blogging service that should be found in your social network portfolio.

News Aggregation keeper: Reddit

Trying to find the ideal news aggregator on the Web can be difficult. Depending on your definition, there's conceivably hundreds of services that package the best stories into one page. But it's the "social" news aggregation services, like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon that lead the pack. And although Digg is the most popular service in that grouping, I'm a firm believer that Reddit deserves to stay in your portfolio as your chosen news aggregation service.

Normally, I would pick the social site that offers the largest and most engaged community. But when it comes to news aggregation sites, Digg simply doesn't cut it. Sure, it's the biggest and arguably the most important to content sites, but that alone doesn't make it the best. Instead, I find Reddit's site design, while simple and ugly to some, incredibly useful and designed to help users find the best stories as quickly as possible without gaudy extras. But the most important differentiating factor working to Reddit's advantage is its community. It might be smaller than Digg's, but generally, the comments on each story are more edifying and lack the invective that has become a staple for Kevin Rose's brainchild.

Reddit may not be the biggest, its site design may be odd, and its community not as rabid, but in terms of providing interesting stories on a slew of topics without as much "gaming," it leads the pack and deserves to be in your social network portfolio.

Social Network keeper: Facebook

Choosing the single social network to use while ditching the rest isn't easy, since most of us have friends scattered across Friendster, Hi5, and MySpace. But it's because of those few friends still clinging to the past that we hold on to all those social networks. Enough is enough. It's time to rebuff the rest and stick to Facebook.

Why choose Facebook when MySpace is still the world's most popular social network? It's simple: Facebook doesn't have the awful design found on MySpace profile pages, offers a huge, engaged community, and most importantly, it's growing at a rapid rate, which means all those friends who still hang out at Friendster, LiveJournal, or even MySpace are starting to make their way to Facebook.

MySpace still provides value and Hi5 could be a significant competitor in just a few short years, but for now, Facebook, with its addicting features, applications, and growing community, should find its way to your portfolio as you leave the others out.

Video site keeper: YouTube

Maybe YouTube is the safe choice for the only social video site you should keep in your network portfolio, but I simply don't see how anyone can choose anything else. Vimeo is nice, but much of its content is barely watchable and while Metacafe is still an interesting site worth visiting, it doesn't provide the professional content that YouTube does.

And it's that professional content that I find most valuable when it comes to YouTube. Sometimes, I want to find a music video that isn't available elsewhere and YouTube will have it. And when I'm feeling nostalgic and I want to watch an old clip from The Wonder Years, it's sitting on YouTube waiting for me. As a bonus, some of the user-generated content is pretty good too, though most of it is strange.

I know that anyone can make a case for why practically any user-generated video site on the Web should be the exclusive service in your portfolio, but when it comes to finding the obscure, professional, or just plain weird, YouTube is the only place to go. All the others are practically useless.

Magnolia's Larry Halff (right) and Citizen Agency's Tara Hunt announce plans to open up the social-bookmarking service in the coming months. To see the whole presentation click the credit link below.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Daniel Terdiman)

On Friday social-bookmarking service Magnolia announced plans to open up its source code to let anyone add its bookmarking functionality to their site or private organization.

To cut through some of the tech talk it's akin to WordPress.com offering WordPress.org, a downloadable version that can be hosted on the user's own servers . More importantly, the project should help speed up the development of both the hosted and user-installed iterations of the service by tapping into a community of avid developers.

Some of the things to look forward to in this next version include:

• A new stream view that shows you the freshest bookmarks of people you're friends with on one single page.
• Support for both OAuth and OpenID, with the latter making it easier for people to sign into hosted builds of Magnolia.
• Sidebar customization
• Theming

The open-source version won't be available to developers until sometime in September, with a beta version (read: consumer friendly) on track for December and into the first part of 2009. In the meantime, if you're a developer looking to get your mitts on the code it will be made available here.