Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious | Hacker News Reader

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

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55 pointsbengross36 comments

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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/

> (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.

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.

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.

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.

Going from 5k to 5M is really impressive - congrats on your sudden impressive growth!

However, the "there was no downtime" seems a bit disingenuous given my own experience signing up for the service yesterday. I received many "service unavailable" messages during signup, after clicking on the email verification link, and finally after signing up. Searching Twitter at the time for "Pinboard" showed that many other users were getting the same message (e.g. http://twitter.com/davekincaid/status/15520511979167744) ... there were many others, but unfortunately Twitter's 'older tweets' search doesn't seem to be working now.

I actually didn't care that the service was down for me even though I had just paid to sign up for it; I figured you guys were getting absolutely hammered by the unexpected news around Delicious. However, seeing your response here was surprising - either you didn't have monitoring tools set up to show you that indeed there was downtime or we have a drastically different definition of 'downtime'.

It's the former - on our end we didn't see any errors logged, and had no trouble reaching the site. We did see sporadic reports on Twitter and tried to chase them down, but there was so much going on we couldn't spend much time on it. Eventually pvg made some apache config changes on the fly that seemed to banish the problem for good.

If that was the general experience people had with the site last night, then it absolutely was downtime.

Thanks for the response and insight - I definitely understand that it's hard to keep track of sporadic issues especially when usage is exploding like yours did in the last few days.

> There was no downtime, and no slow access.

There was for me. I tried signing up after that comment but had trouble. In fact, I thought the site was just slow in general. It was the first time I've visited, so I don't know if that response time was normal, but it was slow nonetheless.

Based on other responses here and what I've heard from friends and seen on Twitter etc., I don't think I am the only one that felt this. I'm glad you're happy with your performance, and I think it's great you guys were a destination a lot of delicious users chose to head to, but I was just expressing an opinion.

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."

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good point. TANSSAAFL.

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.

> I pay for email

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

In my case fastmail.fm, zenfolio.com, and pinboard.in.

How is their web UI compared to Gmail, for example? Do you feel like you're missing out on any features, or do you access mail exclusively via a desktop client?

They have a really nice web GUI. I use it for access to my mail when I'm away from my laptop, where I use Mail.app. I haven't used gmail enough to do a direct comparison. The search is good, and you can set up very complicated rules to file mail into folders.

fastmail.fm. Their webmail is pants (all webmail save GMail is pants), but their IMAP service has been 100% bulletproof. Oh, and MobileMe for pics, but that's because I'm trapped in the MobileMe universe because the value of OTA contact syncing is just ... barely ... enough, and now most of my pics are there. Vendor lock in is easy; the first hit (when I was an employee) was free.

I pay for Fastmail too. But I hate myself for it. Gmail offers IMAP nowadays, no?

Yes.

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.

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.

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.

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 :>

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

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