from Hacker News

Pinboard Turns Five

by thisisblurry on 7/10/14, 3:05 AM with 116 comments

• by firebones on 7/10/14, 4:29 AM

  I love Maciej's writing. His recent post on idlewords.com about his trip to Yemen was great, and his annual reports on Pinboard are up there with Buffett in terms of eloquence and wry humor that just skirts the edges of being laconic.

  I also love Pinboard, as well as joshu's original del.icio.us, and all services that find that completely narrow utility that I like to call "stripped and liberated". Stripped in the sense that they seek to do one thing well, on the face of humanity, forever. Liberated in the sense that they are liberated from the need to be beholden to investors or broader corporate strategies which shred their utility and focus in service of some other imperative.

  Has the day of the "stripped and liberated" service come and gone? Or are there still opportunities waiting to be discovered?

• by mzehrer on 7/10/14, 6:56 AM

  Maciej's post "Don't be a free user" [https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/] is still one of my favourites. The whole concept of doing something that is "just big enough" in ways of financial success and scaling is so liberating. You will end up doing something sustainable instead of constantly worrying about the outcome of your "startup" adventure. I even adopted the one-time payment business model for my own service [crofflr.com] which is so refreshingly anti-business, you will meet users that activley complain that they can't pay you more. And after meeting Maciej in real life (hope to see you again here in Berlin) and learning how much he cares about Pinboard and it's users, I'm totally convinced that this is the right way to do business and that it's okay to ignore all the flashy Yo, Snapchat and Pinterest crap out there. I really like the idea of Mom&Pop businesses on the internet.

• by sdevlin on 7/10/14, 4:46 AM

  Pinboard is an awesome service. If you don't have an account, you should. It's especially refreshing for those (like me) who despise the Internet of JavaScript Bullshit. Pinboard is fast as hell because it doesn't waste your time with flashy nonsense.

  Second: Maciej is a great writer. If you're not reading his articles (http://www.idlewords.com/), you should be.

• by danso on 7/10/14, 4:31 AM

  Was just about to go to bed but felt compelled to comment on this. Several years ago, or whenever Pinboard was a little less than $9, I signed up for it on a whim but kind of thought my coworker was crazy...except for content sites (i.e. Spotify and Netflix)...paying for an online service just seemed alien, and paying for a bookmarking service, a feature that has been functional in browsers for a long while...that seemed completely bonkers (I never got into delicio.us or its competitors). The only reason I can possibly think of for having joined was that my co-worker is much smarter and more efficient than I am.

  Today, Pinboard is to me the epitome of a life/work-enhancing product...I use it daily to capture HN links, it's incredibly unintrusive, and not once since I've been on it has it been down when I've needed to refer to my bookmarks. I keep forgetting that I've already paid a one-time fee for it, and if it decided to secretly charge me on a reoccurring basis, I probably wouldn't notice and might not even care.

  I don't think it's coincidence that my fondness of Pinboard correlates with how I've changed as a developer, becoming much less interested in do-it-all frameworks such as Rails, and aspiring to spend more time at the command line. I've had a much greater appreciation for simplicity, not because I'm particularly Zen, but because I don't want a service or a program or a framework to do everything for me. In the journalism/research world, people frequently discuss tips and advice on bookmarking apps. I keep pushing Pinboard.in but I don't think many people have been interested in it. Why would they pay for it when all it does is record bookmarks in plaintext, whereas Evernote saves so many different kinds of media, has an iPad app, and is free, even if it crashes once in awhile and can be unpredictable in how it saves content, etc. etc...but hey, it seems like a real product, right?

  I just shake my head. It took me a few years of pain to realize that even the slightest bit of friction prevents a tool from being used daily...and when your job depends on quick, efficient information retrieval, a non-daily tool is hazardous...but I only learned it through experience. So, Pinboard will always be a great product to me, but I'm not going to put much energy into evangelizing for it :)

• by tptacek on 7/10/14, 6:00 AM

  Pinboard is so great. I've bookmarked dozens and dozens of PDF crypto papers, and Pinboard does full-text search across them (and everything else I've bookmarked); I can type "pin subgroup" in my browser bar and poof! I have the paper I was trying to remember that breaks down the known attacks on GCM. To me, it's not "bookmarking" so much as "personal search".

  Also, I would pay 2x if it generated more published back-and-forth with the current owners of Delicious.

• by pixelmonkey on 7/10/14, 4:03 AM

  Great essay and reflection, full of some funny nuggets:

  "My strategy of pre-emptively antagonizing anyone who might possibly have an interest in acquiring or funding the site has worked wonderfully."

  "I enjoy the looking-glass aspect of our industry, where running a mildly profitable small business makes me a crazy maverick not afraid to break all the rules."

• by trendyy on 7/10/14, 12:01 PM

  When I first read Maciej's tweets and blogs early on I thought he was a cynical arsehole.

  As time went on I realised the tech industry could use a few more cynical arseholes.

• by oskarth on 7/10/14, 9:44 AM

  I really like Pinboard, and I used to use it a lot but for some reason I stopped. I'd like to start using it again. There's a big elephant in my library though: thousands of chrome bookmarks, uncategorized ("I like this!" ctrl-D).

  Is it possible to import all my Chrome bookmarks and have them auto-tagged based on popular tags?

  Even if full coverage isn't possible, partial would be great. For example, I have hundreds of books bookmarked, all of them on Amazon (books). Similar with imdb (movies), .pdfs (papers), youtube (videos), etc.

• by mcherm on 7/10/14, 2:55 PM

  > So the biggest risk in a project like this remains burnout.

  Actually, my biggest concern is a continuity plan. What happens to Pinboard (and my data) if Maciej gets "hit by a bus"?

• by bravura on 7/10/14, 10:11 AM

  I love pinboard. Can I make a feature suggestion? (Is maciej active on HN these days?)

  I'm sick of giving things tags. I imagine some users like to tag things and some, like me, don't want to.

  Can you create an autotag mode? You can mix a) predictions based upon the body text, and b) manual tags from users not in lazy mode. You could allow users to drop bad autotags for a particular URL.

• by bambax on 7/10/14, 10:21 AM

  > the site makes roughly the same amount of money (around $200K) every year

  Where does the money come from? Between 2013 and 2014 the site apparently gained just 1K customers, and only new customers pay (around $10) so that would mean $10k of revenue from new users.

  I understand there's an option to pay more to "archive" stuff, but does that bring an additional $190k of revenue??

  (Disclaimer: I'm a happy user of Pinboard. I don't "love" it but I use it regularly).

• by clarky07 on 7/10/14, 5:48 AM

  I love reading about pinboard and it's success. it's the epitome of a business that does something small that solves a pain point and does it well. Now, it's not a huge pain point, so it's never going to be a billion dollar business (i don't think) but it shows that people will indeed still pay for software when you make their lives a little bit better.

• by fmavituna on 7/10/14, 11:11 AM

  What's the best way to use pinboard? Do you use bookmarklet or an extension?

  I tried the extension and the bookmarklet on their website but both have really sub-part experience in many levels. Are there any alternative and better ways to utilize pinboard?

• by fisher-lebo on 7/10/14, 5:17 AM

  Why did social bookmarking die? I say this in the sense that obviously Pinboard shows it is still around, but the hype and velocity that was in the space a few years back is gone.

  Hacker News, Reddit, and bookmarks in your browser don't do the same thing. The former two because links you submit to them are not considered "yours" in the same way del.icio.us and Pinboard, and browser bookmarks because they are not social in the same way.

  I guess Twitter does the same thing for a lot of people but it isn't as focused and it doesn't feel the same to me.

  Does anyone else have any thoughts? Is social bookmarking forever relegated to a niche market or...?

• by wowtip on 7/10/14, 7:20 AM

  I really like the idea and the philosophy behind this site.

  What bothers me and keeps me from using it is the fact that it seems to be a one man show.

  I could really use this, but my bookmarks have too much time invested to be put on a service I cannot trust completely to stay around.

  What would happen to the bookmark collection if main dev is hit by a bus (heaven forbid) or just lose interest? Could not find anything on this in FAQ.

  TOS mentions "If the site ceases operation, you will receive an opportunity to download your stored data in a format suitable for import into other bookmarking services."

  But the concept seems well thought out, can a current user confirm my worries are unfounded?

• by kmfrk on 7/10/14, 8:42 AM

  Speaking of, it looks like pg or whoever finally unbanned Maciej from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=idlewords.

• by joelcarranza on 7/10/14, 3:08 PM

  Shameless plug: my pinboard iOS app Pinswift is on sale today for a dollar (down from 5) to celebrate Pinboard's birthday. If you are a Pinboard fan, or are just getting started, please consider trying out the app.

  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pinswift-fast-powerful-pinbo...

• by edsu on 7/10/14, 11:18 AM

  How about we put a human face on pinboard users and tweet our stats (# of bookmarks, total storage, url) from our profile pages using the #pinboard5 tag? So for example something like: https://twitter.com/edsu/status/487193412631003137

• by vardhanw on 7/10/14, 5:37 PM

  I use diigo with almost all the benefits I could gather for pinboard from this thread - tagging, annotation, cloudsync, light, extensions, read later etc. And it is free. Am I missing something? I have thousands of bookmarks, searchable, easy access, one click bookmarking, etc. Is there an advantage to switch?

• by rabino on 7/10/14, 5:09 AM

  Maciej, if you are reading this... can you implement some kind of optional recurring charge? I want to pay you at least every year. I feel I'm stealing from you.

  No, I don't want to pay for archives. It's not a service I find useful for me.

• by consta on 7/10/14, 8:24 AM

  The blog post states that Pinboard makes around $200k a year but they charge only a one-time fee of $10. Does that mean they get 20k signups each year? Does Pinboard display ads or is there another business model behind it?

• by zetx on 7/10/14, 5:15 PM

  Pinboard is indeed wonderful. What I find lacking is a replacement for the old Delicious Firefox extension which included a way to use [Delicious] bookmarked custom searches in the browser.

• by sideproject on 7/10/14, 4:29 AM

  Awesome. Always enjoy reading your thoughts on your Pinboard. But I was always curious on how to correctly pronounce your name. :)

• by john2x on 7/10/14, 9:35 AM

  Love pinboard and love the pricing scheme.

  I wonder how much work goes into maintaining the site? I'm guessing this is his full-time job?

• by Numberwang on 7/10/14, 7:33 AM

  I just signed up based on the positive feedback from this post. I must say I really like it. Would love for him to include a title suggestion feature similar to the one on Reddit, but other than that the site is more or less perfect.

• by yuhong on 7/10/14, 7:23 AM

  OT, but nowadays delicious is owned by Science Inc. I wonder how well it is doing comparing to the AVOS days.

• by waiterZen on 7/10/14, 6:30 AM

  It's awesome

• by PeterGriffin on 7/10/14, 10:45 AM

  A bit of a lost opportunity, because I've barely heard about Pinboard, and the fact of them celebrating the passage of time since they were found, is extremely trivial. BTW, MySpace recently turned eleven.

  When writing posts and news, typically you want the headline to focus on a new feature, a new app, or if it'll be a number, focus on a meaningful number, like number of users, something that could engage those who aren't engaged right now.

  Way it is, a birthday party of some company I know little about is someone else's party, and I won't even open the article.

• by a3n on 7/10/14, 12:06 PM

  Huzzah!