Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

http://www.messagingnews.com/onmessage/ben-gross/why-pinboardin-is-my-favorite-bookmarking-service

by bengross • 16 years ago

55 36 16 years ago

nathanh• 16 years ago

I just switch to Pinboard from delicious. I really like that I'll be able to search and archive the content of my bookmarks. Here's what it took for me to get started:

- Exported bookmarks from delicious

- Signed up and paid $25 for Pinboard (their non-archiving service is cheaper)

- Imported in to Pinboard (took a few hours because they are experiencing a lot of traffic right now)

- Removed my browser plugins for delicious and replaced with Pinboard bookmarklets

michaelbuckbee• 16 years ago

I just switched to Pinboard as well. At first I was using the bookmarklets as well, but there are actually extensions available (why they aren't linked to from the actual Pinboard site I don't know).

Chrome https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nfccdohlgojifgad...

Safari http://www.chipwreck.de/blog/software/safari-pinboard-extens...

Firefox Plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59188/

avinashv2• 16 years ago

> (took a few hours because they are experiencing a lot of traffic right now)

Honestly, I think that's unacceptable for a relatively unknown service that charges a steep price ($25/year for _bookmarking_ is pretty crazy). To not get good uptime and speedy access and have a bold red banner on the top of your homepage claiming poor scaling is not encouraging.

keidian• 16 years ago

They charge $8.38 at this time (it goes up a little bit for each user, same tiny fraction of cent). The $25 is for extra features that not everyone uses/needs.

Personally, I signed up when it was around $6.30 which means a ton more users in the last while (I signed up when Xmarks was saying they were going under) and with a major bookmarking service going under, a small service getting bombarded with many more users usually gives up the ghost and dies totally, not just slows down for certain functions while others continue on fine.

bengross2• 16 years ago

I agree that it looks bad, but I think they are getting a huge flood of new signups and imports based on all the news around Yahoo potentially shutting down Delicious. All parts of the service were fast (one of the major features for me) until the TechCrunch article yesterday.

I'm using Pinboard.in right now to navigate my collection of bookmarks and manage tags and I don't notice any slowdown. I suspect the slowdown is actually limited to new imports and archiving. There has been no downtime related to all the new signups as far as I have seen. The developers are active on Twitter http://twitter.com/pinboardin and the Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/pinboard-dev/ so you can check out the discussion yourself.

idlewords2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure what you're talking about. There was no downtime, and no slow access.

We went from our normal rate of 5k bookmark writes per day to over 5 million in a 24 hour period without going offline.

Hell, we didn't even get slow. Our median page load times stayed well under a third of a second. We had no advance notice of the announcement and had to handle the spike in traffic on the fly, on one server. Our competitors crashed, we stayed up.

I'm pretty proud of this and I think our users got their money's worth from Pinboard today.

acangiano• 16 years ago

Another good alternative, albeit search-based, is http://historio.us.

agraddy• 16 years ago

I recently switched to historious after seeing it here on HackerNews, and I've been very happy with it so far. It's a great bookmarking service; I'm surprised it hasn't received more attention with the debacle going on at Delicious.

StavrosK• 16 years ago

Thanks guys, the service is a bit backed up right now, with all the importers, but the site should be responsive and functional otherwise. I greatly appreciate everyone's support!

astrofinch• 16 years ago

And there's http://www.diigo.com/learn_more which allows you to annotate and add comments on the pages you bookmark and search only the annotations (or the full text if you want). They archive the pages you read as both HTML and as an image and have support for iOS and Android.

inovica• 16 years ago

I started to use historio.us a few weeks ago when mentioned on here and since then I've upgraded to the paid version. It really is simple to use and its really useful. To be honest I've not used any others, but for someone who used to drag and drop useful sites to my desktop this has been great.

marv_in• 16 years ago

Unless I'm mistaken doesn't Diigo.com do all of these with a free account even?

acconrad• 16 years ago

It baffles me that people want to pay for something that is widely available for free.

sage• 16 years ago

I paid for Pinboard in hope that the financial support will allow them to remain viable and keep the service open indefinitely. I've been burned too many times by using free services that eventually shut down when they realize they can't support themselves with ads.

bengross2• 16 years ago

I guess it all depends on how valuable the service is to you. For me, the one-time signup fee seems minimal for the value I get from a service that I use nearly every day. I've used many other bookmarking services, some of which have already disappeared like Gnolia. Pinboard is very stable, faster than Delicious, and the developers respond to requests quickly. I have no connection with Pinboard other than as a happy customer, but I regularly recommend the service and think it is worth paying for.

I use Pinboard to help collect data for many of my research projects and the archiving capability ($25/ year) is great retrieving pages that have already disappeared, that I want to go back and reference. Yes, I could use other free services and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (which is amazing), but the speed, support, and reliability of Pinboard make it easily worth the cost. I prefer that services I rely on have a sustainable business model. Charging a very reasonable fee to provide quality service seems like a good model to me.

skorgu2• 16 years ago

The original context is different and the tone is flippant but "If you're not paying you're not the customer, you're the product".

Considering how easy it is for ad-supported businesses to suddenly become unsupported and disappear I'm willing to give a nominal fee (~$8 forever) a shot.

_delirium• 16 years ago

A problem, though, is that the inverse isn't necessarily true: if you're paying, it doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't still the product. It mostly depends on whether someone else is paying more. For example, for most magazines, you're the product even when you're paying them a subscription fee.

jfb3• 16 years ago

I pay because I want to be the customer. If I am buying something, I am able to exert market pressure on the provider. If I am a collection of poorly-anonomized data being passed around from J. Random data mining company, I lose this (admittedly, largely nominal) agency.

I pay for email, I pay for hosting photos, and I pay for pinboard.

w1ntermute2• 16 years ago

> I pay for email

Out of curiosity, who do you pay to host your email?

jfb3• 16 years ago

I also pay for a VPS that hosts my blog and Jabber endpoint. I freely admit that I am a little off on the edge of the bell curve here.

fendmark• 16 years ago

I agree with skorgu, jfb and bengross. Personally I have used free bookmarking tools, RSS readers, blogging tools & "free hosting" for years, only to see them go belly up or the founders leave and the product is left to decay or suffer years of unnecessary feature additions.

It gets really old (and time consuming for those who don't have time to burn)

I recently bought Fever for my RSS reader and Pinboard for bookmarking both which I love (and are worth every cent)

Personally I plan on avoiding free SaaS based services in favor of paid or open source self hosted solutions whenever possible.

wzdd• 16 years ago

The alternatives which don't require your own server seem to support themselves through advertising. I consider viewing advertising a cost (and actually I consider it much more of a cost than the $5 I paid to pinboard.in). So, for me, there aren't any widely-available free alternatives.

supahfly_remix• 16 years ago

As an aside, the creator of pinboard, is the anti-PG, (or at least the anti-PG of 2005):

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

"But you, sir [PG], are no painter. And while you hack away at your terminal, or ride your homemade Segway, we painters and musicians are going to be right over here with all the wine, hash, and hot chicks."

keyist• 16 years ago

"As an aside, the creator of pinboard, is the anti-PG, (or at least the anti-PG of 2005)"

That is an unfair and extremely misleading label to apply to the author:

- your selective quote is immediately followed by "Hee hee", which most readers would interpret to mean that said paragraph (or indeed the entire post, since those are the last two words) is a somewhat good-natured poke.

- the criticism in the post is scoped only to the hackers<=>painters analogy

- elsewhere in the post he says "Graham is an excellent author when he sticks to topics that he knows well"

Hardly anti-PG. He's just not a fan of the analogy PG used in some essays. Don't drum up conflict where there is none.

anateus• 16 years ago

The archiving (caching of html+stylesheets+images) is what really makes this service. I've had Delicious bookmarks disappear when people migrated blog platforms, when Yahoo closed Geocities, and countless other occasions.

The only thing that can make it better is the ability to export the full caches. It does let you export 25 bookmarks (and their caches) for offline access.

I've been a member at the $25 level since regular membership was $6 :>

Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

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