Many of you may remember Ma.gnolia—the nifty social bookmarking tool that unfortunately imploded at the beginning of this year. Founded by Larry Halff almost 4 years ago, the site had a different aesthetic and attitude toward sharing information. It was one of the more community-minded tools I remember from that era, offering features like the ability to “thank” the sharer of a useful link, for example. It also possessed clean design and careful site organization. In my opinion, its take on sharing data really differentiated it.

Like many great things, Ma.gnolia didn’t start out to be big, but rather started out to be good—and it was. And, as is often the case with things that are good, Ma.gnolia become big by virtue of that goodness. Ironically, even though the membership of the service reached hundreds of thousands of account holders and tens of thousands of regular users, the infrastructure supporting the site was still incredibly small. It was run almost solely by Larry and the hardware and bandwidth he could support by himself. Unfortunately, there were some technical limitations to the honorable yet fragile DIY set-up running behind the scenes that ultimately led to the site’s premature demise. I was really bummed to watch the VOD-cast explaining the catastrophic nature of the data loss back in February and have thought about the site often, since that time.

I was able to catch up with Larry a while back and talk with him, not about what went wrong with Ma.gnolia 1.0 but rather what is in store for Ma.gnolia 2.0, if anything, and also pick his brain about the future of social bookmarking. If you were a fan of Ma.gnolia in the past, you will be happy to know that it is scheduled to relaunch September 22, by invite only.