Ask HN: Would you pay to bookmark?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078121

by sw1205 • 16 years ago

8 9 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What would a bookmarking site need for you to part with cash?

Is there a big feature that a social bookmarking site could include that would encourage you to potentially pay a small fee to sign up?

Or, like Pinboard, is the ease of bookmarking, over any big features, the reason you may consider signing up to a bookmarking site?

thanks

FreeRadical• 16 years ago

I can't think of any such feature. With Google Chrome I can already organize and search my bookmarks easily.

sw1205• 16 years ago

Would you pay for Pinboard? Say if you could also bookmark Spotify playlists (as an example)?

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

No. There might be some value in page discovery from cross-referencing with other people's bookmarks (eg 'if you like Wired, you might also like this site called HN') but that's what links and trackbacks are for. My experience is that I'm more likely to be presented with stuff that is 90% irrelevant.

I honestly don't see any money in this...I think paid booksmarks are doomed to failure in the same fashion that link farming and web rings turned out to be dead ends.

Jlloyd• 16 years ago

I pay for instapaper and I pay for pinboard. I like viewing stuff later at my conveniance and I just want to bookmark, easily, and not focus on the social side but then I may be in the minority.

doz• 16 years ago

I would pay to be provided with a great service which combines many features which you currently get with multiple sites. Personally don't see the point of having local favourites in your browser if it can be done 'in the cloud', and I don't really care that chrome for example can synchronise bookmarks across multiple computers because I use multiple browsers.

jayliew2• 16 years ago

I'm biased, but entrepreneur to entrepreneur, here's my honest personal opinion. I won't pay for bookmarking. It's too easy for me to cobble together my own solution, and besides, there is already a lot of bookmarking apps that are free.

I think there are certain things in life that the market is not willing to pay for. Bookmarking may be one of them. On a related note, I'm looking around at all the all the micropayment solutions out there on the web. Supposedly the idea was that you can read a blog post, and if you like it so much, you can tip a penny if you want. I haven't heard too much success in that regard .. but I suspect that people aren't willing to pay. And as an entrepreneur, it's tough to change the market (impossible?)

To be able to charge, your value proposition has to be not just incrementally, but way waaaay significantly "above the rest" such that it's just such a disadvantage for me _not_ to give you my money to use your product. Use Delicious as your baseline. Delicious is free. So anything you offer that is also offered by Delicious, you can't really charge for it. What do you offer on top of that that is worth people opening up their wallets?

If so, I'd be interested to hear what you have.

cmars232• 16 years ago

No. In fact, lately I find its too much trouble even to bother logging into delicious. I'll either star it or share it in Google Reader, or else I'll let it go. If it really matters, I'll just search for it again. Guess I'm feeding Google "the Big Pig" with all my habits, but I'm too lazy to care.

It'd be kind of interesting to more easily group links around some train of thought (stuff I need for a baseline XP install, links related to some startup idea, etc.) but I doubt I'd ever pay for it. I can use tags for this, but it's always been kind of a pain to actually do it in delicious.

theprodigy• 16 years ago

I'd pay for a list of bookmarks from various opinion leaders. If george soros or andreesen bookmarked on a consistent basis content that they read or think is important to read I would be interested in that. What would be good is if they also included a short commentary of the importance.

The value to me is I can get a feel for what some of the most influential people are interested in and what specific information they are using to shape their opinions on various topics.

Twitter is some what like this, but there needs to be good consistent content.

jayliew2• 16 years ago

That's actually a good idea. If people I follow & respect bookmarked, I would consider paying for it since I am interested in their thought process.

Basically you want to follow their web "foot prints". On the flip side, that's exactly what I use FriendFeed for (to leave my web footprints for anybody who cares to follow), and that's already free. So the technology to follow someone else's web trail already exist in many forms (delicious, FriendFeed), and they are free.

So the question becomes: are the thought leaders using it and are they fine with others following them (and will they be ok if those followers are charged?)

It becomes a market problem, not a technology problem.

Ask HN: Would you pay to bookmark?

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