Our friend Chris Messina was closer to the death of ma.gnolia than most of us, having worked for them as a consultant, as well as having a close relationship with the site owner. He writes with great insight about how this has affected him personally,….

Specific replies:

@Todd: yeah, giving everything permalinks is pretty critical.

@ako: well, it’s not exactly that straight forward. While I agree that we’ll see a shift to more real-time interactions on the web, having a record of interactions and exchanges can prove valuable, in a way that we may not currently be able to imagine. While I don’t mourn the [present] loss of my bookmarks, I still think that it would have been nice to have a collection of them, especially given the metadata that I personally added to them (tags, descriptions, ratings, etc).

The same holds true for Twitter — I oftentimes cite Twitter as a source of news. If Twitter didn’t have permalinks per post, that would be like newspapers not keeping back issues of prior papers. Losing that history, to me, would be a crime!

@Tom Gardner: your point is orthogonal to mine. It goes without saying that having a robust, triple-redundant backup system is something that services *should* have. Ma.gnolia didn’t; that can’t be undone. You don’t realize the value of good backups until you need them, and that’s because, as they say, hindsight is 20/20.

Now, not all services will have a good backup system. Even Nokia got this wrong recently. You can chide all you want, but if a service goes down, sometimes backups will fail. Sometimes companies will go under. Sometimes sites will be removed from the net by overzealous governments. In those cases, having distributed caches across the web are your only recourse to retrieve public data. Microformats at least help to improve those situations, but certainly don’t replace a regular backup and archive routine.

@Kai: yep, that’s true. I was only discussing public data.

@Bengt: I don’t think Larry made any excuses. He screwed up, admits his mistake, and has taken steps to address the problem. He can’t go back in time, but if and when Ma.gnolia lives again, I’m sure he’ll trust someone else more versed in IT to manage his infrastructure. It’s not about making excuses; it’s about taking responsibility for this situation and accepting that sometimes shit really does happen, but at least if you take a simple step like using microformats (among other things), if and when it does, you have a distributed way of recovering the data.

Features like structuring your data with Microformats, and paying consultants to talk to you about them, are useless if you don’t get the basics – like backup – right.

I am sure that if you ask Magnolia now if they would have rather spent the time, money and resources they did on Microformat support instead on backups, they would now choose the later.

Too many developers and consultants spending too much time on the insignificant as core development principals are forgotten.

Twitter is like talking. Backup shouldn’t be that important. Image everything anybody ever said was archived somewhere… Where do your words go after you’ve said them?