Lessons Learned from Ma.gnolia Story

Ma.gnolia was built with the Ruby on Rails framework four years ago when cloud computing services weren’t offered. Moreover, Ma.gnolia is funded, developed and maintained by just one man. That fact alone is astounding because not too many people can create and manage a social networking site by themselves (although I am aware of some geeks who built social networking sites for others but didn’t get any richer out of doing it.) He was just about to build a business model out of it but in the past few days, things just didn’t turn out well for him. Although I am not a ma.gnolia user (I use digg and del.icio.us), I express my sympathies because in the past I had this illusion of creating a social networking site for young people wherein the app is both a publishing tool and a place for interacting with others. I was not entirely interested in adopting or replicating features of existing social networking sites because personally, I see no need for those features.

It’s more of an interest than a business idea. I always believed that “if you love what you do, things will follow through” which may be a very optimistic philosophy if you consider all factors that would affect your goals. Now that I have the know-how and the skills to create such site, a lot of things are still holding me back and for a good reason, I choose not to pursue it. But then again, there’s always something else for you.

So what can we deduce from the Ma.gnolia Story?

It’s not easy to start any venture alone. Setting up your development server at home is OK but using it for production isn’t. Check out cloud computing service providers like Amazon or Rackspace.