A different approach to bookmarking | Hacker News Reader

A different approach to bookmarking

copyto.co

43 pointscopyto40 comments

To be "honest", "different" here means "almost identical to historious, diigo, evernote", etc. There already are plenty of players in the space, but delicious has spoilt users enough that they don't want to pay for these services.

Exactly right. I'm not going to pay for a bookmarking service when I adopted pinboard.in early, before it cost anything, and also have an Evernote account. The market is already quite crowded by very smart people.

Clone delicious and make basic functionality free (tags, search, public bookmarks) and make a paid service that includes all the "nice to haves" like private bookmarks, page caching, bookmark exporting/importing, etc.

Also a noticeable difference from all these sites is that I when I go to delicious.com I immediately see what it does (bookmarks). All these other sites have a landing page to explain how they've made the simple process of saving links online more complicated.

Even though it's a crowded space, there are demographics/verticals that different versions of this kind of tool could appeal to. Small feature differences and simplicity can be a selling point, for example.

Any one know who the team is?

There are some differences though like copyto lets you save selected parts of a page which is kind of the whole purpose behind

Hmm, I thought Evernote lets you do that as well. Regardless, though, competition is always good!

Evernote does pretty much everything thats for sure. 30 million funding should do the trick. Historious is also a nice alternative though, at least they have a stable path only on bookmarking. Anyways competition really makes services better.

Haha yep, you're spot on for evernote...

Whoops, for some reason I put "honest" in quotes, I didn't mean that and I can't edit it now.

I stronly suggest you experiment with charging a one-time fee based on your estimated lifetime value of a customer. $1.99 in monthly fees for a personal utility like this is not too much to pay, it's the mental overhead which stops me from buying it. And you lose money per transaction.

Pinboard's pricing model is great here. A one-time fee of around $10 to use the service and $25 per annum archival fees. You should consider doing something similar.

Pinboard has also a roadmap, so you know what to expect in the next months.

The monthly fee is a good "you can stop when you want" argument. If a new bookmark service with an innovative feature comes out in 2 months, you can change without hesitation.

Maybe propose both choices. Something like 22$/year or 1,99$/month.

I think a recurring fee for this kind of service is a bad idea. Either you spend some time each month deciding whether you got $X of value, or you choose not to bother and feel vaguely taken advantage of (at least, that's my own personal experience with Audible.com and other monthly services).

Thanks for reminding me to go update the roadmap :-)

This seems like a step in the right direction, but I'd love to see a bookmarking service make accessing and utilizing bookmarks easy by 1) indexing bookmarked pages and extracting keywords & identifying content & enabling tag based search + auto-organized index 2) offer an easy to use interface for accessing the bookmarks.

The main annoyance I have with bookmarking present day bookmarking tools is the amount of steps it requires. Selecting text to be bookmarked is nice but it's an extra action. I don't want to have to file/tag/place in folder, mouse drag and click around just to bookmark a page. Why not a single click?

*currently using the note in reader bookmarklet for google reader

My experience is that the easier to bookmark a page the least likely I will get back to it (except the two dozen or so in the bookmarks bar in Chrome).

I built for my own use with Google App Engine this service I call "ting" (sample search: http://ting-1.appspot.com/rt?rt=startup) and with each link I want to save I enter tags and a summary; this way I know I only save pages that I really believe will be useful to me in the long run. (I also cut and paste the link, making it even more time consuming)

(Edit: Disregard this comment. Copyto has a fine business plan, a flat $1.99/month fee.)

I have a policy of only investing my time in a service if I know their monetization plan, to avoid getting burned by shutdowns or features moved to premium account plans. Does Copyto have one yet? I see no ads, the privacy policy is strict enough to make data-mining impossible, and there doesn't seem to be a way to pay.

Other than that, this looks great. It has all the features I use on Pinboard, and the thumbnail view could be handy.

I'm confused by your comment and the replies to it. Maybe the page changed since you posted it, but if you visit the sign up page[1] now, it says (in big letters, right up at the top left):

    just for $1.99/month
    no limit, no fancy premium upgrades.
    no contract needed, cancel anytime.

[1] http://copyto.co/signup.php

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see that. Disregard my comment.

Yea. That was my impression too. Pinboard has a monetization model that looks to be pretty stable. This doesn't look like it necessarily has a business plan other than 'social.'

I noticed that after you signup there is a Paypal subscription fee of 1.99 per month

Any way to import bookmarks from delicious/diigo/pinboard ?

Seems like the others bookmarking services, i don't really see the 'different approach'... maybe the screenshot part ?

This seems like a very similar service to the wildly popular Instapaper. I'm curious what the difference is or how Copyto plans to differentiate themselves.

Man, I always get the same observation with historio.us as well. How are they similar? Instapaper saves links for later, historious saves the full content of bookmarks and allows you to perform full text search on it. They're nothing alike.

I guess the difference might be the tools they provide to drag and select parts of pages and only save them to read later

"You will be able to select all or some of the content on your bookmarked page to save it as long as you want."

Really? Even if copyright holders litigiously suggest otherwise?

Of more practical value, does it work on pages that use JavaScript to dynamically render a page?

Copyright issue applies to all services that allow you to save a page, even Google would be guilty for caching. It is up to the user to judge for a copyright infringement before saving a page.

Since I'm currently exploring some of the same problems, I'd like to ask further..

How do you guard yourself against user-shared copyrighted content* ? Do you delete on request from the copyright holders? Do you weed out in the shared content once in a while? Do you have some kind of policy or agreement transfering the infrigement to the sharing user in such cases ?

*Say, a user has access to some content behind a paywall, but shares it un-blocked through your service.

We have to delete public content that has been requested to be deleted by the copyright holders. In such a case the user will be notified about the infirigement and the possible removal of his content.

If you have an example site that dynamically renders a page I could try it out and show you the result

http://lifehacker.com/#!5785555/how-perfectionism-can-lead-t...

for example.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Firefox will do a successful Save As of the content, even though View Source only shows the original page. And the ScrapBook plug-in also saves the page correctly.

There you go: http://copyto.co/b/MTQ , used the Chrome extension to select the main content only and saved it + made the bookmark public

Sweet! Thanks.

Looks like an awfully familiar approach to bookmarking from where I sit. But hey, welcome!

I am not usually using IE, but the site looks bad under IE8, I can confirm that.

But you know what..? I would not bother fixing it if I were you. Seriously, I don't think it's worth the trouble.

Thats something I'm really ashamed of. Until having some kind of help on my side I also don't think it would be worth the trouble.

Sorry if I'm missing something, but what would make me use this instead of Evernote? The free version has served me nicely for a while and it also does the nice thumbnailing feature.

Does anyone know if they support exporting bookmarks just in case I don't feel like paying them $24/year for bookmarks anymore?

Got an email address? I don't see any email addresses or feedback forms on the public site.

I guess they forgot to add it on the public site. Their email is support (at) copyto.co

Just a feedback- design is broken in IE7 & IE8. Otherwise it looks good service to me.

Amazing when HN generate so much comment on services with no About section.

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