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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.