Necessity is the mother of invention, but it helps to have an open API, too.
Last Friday, social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia suffered a major server meltdown, losing the bulk of its user data as well as its backup. Since then, the company has been desperately trying to recover its users' lost data in any way possible.
Tuesday morning, a new automated tool popped up that shows Ma.gnolia is using FriendFeed to help repopulate its database.
If you're a user of both services and you previously connected your accounts so your Ma.gnolia bookmarks show up in your FriendFeed stream, Ma.gnolia can gather up everything you saved by querying FriendFeed.
The automated tool at recovery.ma.gnolia.com asks for your FriendFeed nickname and your FriendFeeed remote key. Every user has a unique key, and you don't need to find it or have it memorized. Just make sure you're logged in to FriendFeed and click on the access link provided by Ma.gnolia. You'll be able to copy your key.
FriendFeed is a lifestreaming service that aggregates all of your activities on various social sites across the web. It also serves as a de facto mirroring tool, enabling you to passively back up your data as you deposit it inside the various databases at all the sites where you participate. Save a bookmark at Ma.gnolia or comment on a Flickr photo, and that piece of data gets added to your FriendFeed account as well.
Obviously, Ma.gnolia's ad hoc import tool won't work for everyone -- only those forward-thinking enough to have signed up for both services -- but for disaster recovery purposes, this approach is very clever.
Next time people ask me where the value is in a site like FriendFeed, I'm going to cite this example.
Thanks to factoryjoe for the heads up!
See Also:
