Blog Comment Re: Ma.gnolia Outage / The Matrix Files

[Joseph Dunphy]

A comment that I submitted to a blog entitled "The Matrix Files", on a
post entitled "Oh Where, Oh Where Can My Bookmarks Be? Magnolia
Suffers Huge Outage!" follows. The article was at

thematrixfiles dot net/blog/magnolia-outage/

I'm declining to give that site a linkback for reasons which should
soon be obvious. A social networking site which I had just started
using (Ma.gnolia) suffered a disastrous system failure on January 30
of this year, and still has not returned as of the time of this
writing. I googled "Ma.gnolia" and "outage", and encountered Joanna
Pineda's blog.

This is what I wrote, mild profanity present there softened for
reposting here:

> Can I really be pi**ed off that my bookmarks
> are gone when I haven’t paid Magnolia a dime?"

Sure you can. Maybe.

Let's say that somebody offered to "do you a favor" by driving you
somewhere, and abandoned you at an interstate rest stop. Even though
no money would have changed hands, this would still be generally
agreed to be pretty d**ned evil. Whether one can sue somebody for
something like that or not is a legal question. Whether one has a
right to be pi**ed off at him is a moral one, not at all the same
thing.

But I'm not so sure that Ma.gnolia presents us with an analogous
situation. Let's say that instead of the person offering you a ride
abandoning you, his car broke down, and you were both stranded. Would
you scream at him about that, or would you just accept that as he
tried to help you out, he had a little bad luck?

If people are going to invite us to rely on them, we have a right to
expect them to make a good faith effort to be reliable. For them to do
anything less is for them to set us up. But I'm not so sure that
Ma.gnolia has failed to make that good faith effort. System failures
do occur, and there is a finite probability that one's backup will
fail at exactly the moment it is needed. Nobody, no matter how
conscientious, can change this reality.

I will point out that if one looks at the record of outages, they seem
to get back up a lot more quickly than a lot of other sites have (eg.
Tribe), so they do seem to be making an honest effort.

> And if Magnolia does recover, will I trust them
> with my bookmarks again? Ugh.

Bad luck can happen to anybody. What we should judge people on is not
on what happens to them, but how they respond to it.

There are options that you, as a user, have that can reduce the
likelihood of you losing your bookmarks and comments. I'm sure you
know how to save pages to your hard disk, create subdirectories for
your pages. Bookmarks can be saved on one's computer easily enough,
and backup pages created on other services, such as Simpy,
Del.ici.ous, and Stumbleupon.

At some point, I hope, the people at Ma.gnolia will get their site
back online, and will be available for our questions, some of which
I'm sure will be about their plans to make incidents of this kind less
likely to occur in the future. Perhaps we should wait until they have
a chance to give us their answers, before making our judgments final?


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end of comment
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I submitted this comment on January 31, and as of today, February 4,
it has still not appeared on Ms. Pineda's blog, even though Pineda has
been back to moderate, as we can see by the fact that she has posted
to that blog since then:

thematrixfiles dot net/blog/stalking-chris-sacca/

Post dated February 4 (today). Very early, today, in fact - I saw it
before I went to bed last night. I'm sure that somebody will say
something like "it's her blog and her privilege", and up to a point,
I'll agree with that - she is entitled to the freedom to accept or
reject comments as she pleases. What she is not entitled to is the
absolute freedom to do so without anybody thinking any the less of
her, should she make that decision capriciously. The piece above was a
perfectly reasonable, politely written comment that was absolutely on-
topic where it was posted, on a blog that invites comments and has
accepted them in the past. Having written it, I found that my time was
put to waste. That being the case, I will never post to Pineda's blog
again, and probably won't even read the thing.

As for Ma.gnolia, I did and still do wish that small company the best
of luck on its recovery. They'll lose a lot of users, this time around
- there can be little doubt of that - but I'm not so sure that they're
done. The remaining users will probably wonder what plans the company
has for improving the backing up of the data on its system. For the
users to ask for improvements in this area would not unreasonable -
consider the hardship of having to rebuild the same site twice, and
consider the public relations nightmare for the company that would
have to ask its users to do that. The monetary value of security just
went up in that location, and one might expect that spending will
reflect that.

My hope is that investors will look past the current mishap, and be
open to giving Ma.gnolia a chance to rebuild - if the company is
willing to address the backup issue. There was a lot to like in that
system - and I hope there will be, again.

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