The Fans Are All Right

http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/10/the_fans_are_all_right/

by phil • 15 years ago

109 16 15 years ago

blog.pinboard.in

jonbro• 15 years ago

I was one of the people that was wondering about the slash fic that was showing up on popular. Quite truthfully I don't mind it, as the popular lists on bookmarking sites are dominated by so much link bait as to be unusable.

Steko• 15 years ago

"By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock. "

It was a good run English, a solid four centuries at the top but can't really top a sentence like that so it's all downhill from here. Chinese you've got some big shoes to fill, 祝你好运.

sp332• 15 years ago

Web 2.0 jargon really does sound like a parody of itself. "Microshaft Web 2.0" video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmo1ef7tVso

steerpike• 15 years ago

This is such a great and fascinating post. Really interesting information and a really positive reaction from a developer.

ionfish• 15 years ago

The really key underlying point here is that to make a web service that expands its audience beyond people would be likely to read Hacker News, one must consider the needs of other groups, especially those who will find the service useful without many changes, and reach out to those people. That it's the fandom community in this case is largely pertinent to Pinboard (and anyone else working on services which might benefit that community), but the wider point has relevance for everyone interested in more paying customers than just web nerds.

peterb• 15 years ago

I agree 100%, but maciej has also found something rare and rather special. A technically savvy group that has a non-technical use case and the ability to clearly articulate their need. Further, their needs are widely applicable to other groups. This does not happen very often.

diamondhead4• 15 years ago

The real mistake is that the founder of Pinboard does run a wrong business. I'm saying this as a Delicious user who uses it for 6 years and lost some bookmarks during the recent retooling. It's bad for running a bookmark website for several years and keeping emphasizing that "we're unsocial and will not be."

maciej, I hope you'll read this; bookmarking has a bright future because it's social and has the enough potential to replace all search engines.

an unsocial bookmarking service is a real example of waste. to me, people who buys your unsocial archiving bookmarking service are not able to type 6 lines of bash scripts to keep their bookmarks in a plain text file. this is what I will do when avos kills delicious. I'll not pay for just archiving website who thinks I'm an idiot enough to buy a poor clone of delicious of 2005.

How can you be proud of selling a clone of an old version of a popular website? Come on!

jashmenn• 15 years ago

diamondhead, while I disagree with your tone I do agree with your premise. That is, with social bookmarking you create an army of curators and this data can certainly rival search engines (for any topic that has achieved critical mass).

One feature I would love to see with pinboard (or delicious) is recommended 'bookmark buddies'. That is, someone whose bookmark tastes overlap with mine (weighted by how rare the bookmark is) [1]. Recommending specific web articles is hard, but I find that following the full bookmark feed of 2 or 3 carefully selected individuals can often be more relevant than generic recommendation services (e.g. Stumble).

[1] This would have been possible on the old delicious site but delicious had severe throttling in place to prevent crawling this data. Now it appears avos has removed the list of 'co-bookmarkers' entirely from the website.

diamondhead4• 15 years ago

I would disagree with my tone, too. Sorry for that. But I really can't understand that how possible is it to clone an early version of delicious, try selling it to the people who abandon their delicious account and criticizing the delicious? This is what bullshit means.

tptacek2• 15 years ago

I pay for Pinboard. Am I an idiot? I didn't think I was, but I suppose the jury is always out.

Maciej makes a living off Pinboard. Silly Maciej! He could be betting his company on a 100-1 shot of making $4MM if he'd just get off his ass and talk to the VCs! Don't worry, silly Maciej. When you inevitably fail, because 100-1 is bad odds, there's a comfortable job at any of 50 other startups waiting for you in the valley.

diamondhead4• 15 years ago

You pay for the delicious of 2005. No more comment.

shabble• 15 years ago

I suspect one of the main features of an avowed unsocial site is that you can be certain you're not going to accidentally fatfinger/misclick and share something you really didn't want to with (some of) your social network.

The consequences of such actions are ever increasing as more people connect with more and more people, widening the visibility of any gaffe, and making recovery more difficult.

Those people with genuinely serious "something to hide" probably wouldn't be using a cloud-store anyway, especially not one that archives the content as well, but miscommunications happen all the time.

Try explaining to your grandmother that you were actually reading up on some bizarre sexual fetishes as part of an anthropology paper.

phil2• 15 years ago

Man, I love everything about this post. Well written, funny title reference, yeah, but in particular it expresses two ideas that I think are extremely important:

* Hypercard was pretty much the high water mark as far as normal people controlling technology is concerned, and we're still trying to make the web that effective.

* When the strange people doing things you don't understand arrive, you must welcome them, and treat them with respect.

The Fans Are All Right

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