Don't Be A Free User
blog.pinboard.in
blog.pinboard.in
This also suggests that there is a pecking order. At the bottom we have start-ups that don't have traction. Then we have start-ups with traction but no income. Then start-ups who can mostly break even. Finally start-ups that have momentum (extra super bonus points for big momentum in a huge market)
The more I look at this model, the better bootstrapping looks.
Which suggests 'gratuitous' is a harsher adjective than strictly requires, and may simply reflect that you aren't fond of profanity's use at all.
I think either dropping the word entirely from your comment or perhaps replacing it with 'prolific', which would not only have been non-judegemental while still conveying the key point, but additionally alliterates nicely too.
Or maybe I'm just overthinking this :)
Which really doesn't sound right. Entrepreneurship is all about being profitable and getting customers and not to get acquired.
So few people in the startup ecosystem sit down and think hard, "Where WILL we make our money? What do we REALLY have to sell?" So many assume that they will get bought because "they have a great product" or "they are the best" or "they have traction," but honestly, that's not even why most bigco's acquire startups. As you pointed out.[1]
This is not a disease of startups alone, of course. Most employees never sit down and ask themselves how & where they create value for their employer, much less how much, and whether they're then earning too little or too much. They just stab around in the dark for a number they think they deserve.
But when an employee gets the value equation wrong, worst case scenario is he/she loses a job. A whole company, product, ecosystem doesn't go down the tubes.
(Sidebar: It really warms my little bootstrapping heart to see this becoming a serious discussion topic lately!)
[1] There are other factors I'd add -- sometimes, it seems like a bigco buys a startup because they have too much M&A budget and simply want to fill a slot, check a genre off their list. "Can't buy Twitter? OK, buy Jaiku and call it a day. tick" Or the ever-popular "this little company annoys us so we'll buy it and kill it so we can stop thinking about it" technique, which sure as hell seems to happen far more than startup cheerleaders will admit.
See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter.
As for the former, there's an unlimited number of examples (for a few, try http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/)
Unfortunately, $7/month from a few people can't keep things afloat.
I was a Delicious user for years, with thousands of links tagged, and I continued using it for as long as I could stand under Avos, but the features that they cut and/or broke in the transition finally made me throw up my hands, give up, and switch...first to Trunk.ly, which Avos then bought and shut down (oops), and then to Pinboard.
I for one welcome my new Pinboard masters, especially if they're willing to fight to keep the service alive. :)
Maybe I'm missing some key feature here ?
Commas instead of spaces for tags breaks my muscle memory. It often saves my bookmarks with no tags at all because of it.
I am continually tempted to rewrite it (or, more likely, its predecessor, which did more for fewer users.)
Yahoo's one was slow and a dead-end but enough good remained that I could get by.
This one is incoherent and sloppy. It doesn't feel like the people developing it have much understanding of (or passion for) the space.
2. The tagging was completely broken in the plug-in; the plug-in, unlike the new interface, still accepted spaces to separate tags. The new site considered EVERY set of tags to be one big unique tag, so several MONTHS of tagging had to be fixed by hand. There are TONS of complaints about this change, and Avos has ignored them all.
3. The secure RSS feeds were limited to 10 items. I use these as feeds for common links (news, comics, what have you) and several of my link folders were truncated by the arbitrary limit. They kept trying to fix this, but seemed to be incapable. When I realized I'd missed nearly a month of one of my favorite comics, I was quite annoyed.
4. Links were just lost several times; I would bookmark something, and two days later look for the bookmark and it would be gone.
I rarely went to the site, so the design changes were irrelevant to me. It looked like they were trying to make it into a Reddit or Digg or equivalent, though, and having the site move further in that direction and away from how I wanted to use it just seemed like a terrible idea.
But the core problem was that they broke their own API and the core functionality that caused me to want to be there to begin with.
Now in Pinboard I don't get to use the Delicious plug-in any more, but everything else Just Works. The site is clean and easy to use. Pinboard also offers an "archive everything" option that's awesome; so many old links eventually go bad, and having an archive of everything you care enough about to link is just cool.
I used it as a kind of lo-fi Hacker News. I was following the bookmarks of a bunch of interesting people. It would aggregate all the bookmarks of the people I follow into one list.
I found that it was a great way to find interesting stuff on a variety of topics. It was a fantastic complement to HN, so I'm really bummed that they killed it. :-(
I'd love to see pinboard implement this (if they haven't already).
You can take a look at the previous HN discussion about the relaunch: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3042207
This is exactly the point the author wants to bring home. If somebody plans on providing a free web-service, you clone it, think of a business model (ads or user registration) and wait until you're the only one in business.
[the citation on this is an AllThingsD post - I just dont have it in front of me anymore]
No, it operates under the very correct assumption that paid services are MUCH LESS common to shut down.
(I shudder every f&%&^n time someone doesn't understand a generalization, and thinks that a few counter arguments disprove a statistical rule).
"""See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter."""
He is not saying that "free services are never carried on by their purchasers", he is saying that free services with no monetization model are in most cases not carried on by their purchasers.
Not familiar with all of them, but Flickr, Paypal and Skype, all have ways of making money and paid accounts. And Youtube has ads too (don't know about Picassa).
Yep. Not to mention that, in paying for the service, you become the service's customer. The relationship with a free service is much murkier; instead, you are often its product, and the company has an incentive to manipulate you and breach your trust.
I pulled the $100+/year cost per user figure out of my ass. It's probably much higher for Flickr.
I have it on good authority from people very close to the project that Flickr was never once in the black. Ditto for Skype.
Your whole comment, in fact, supports the idea that "if a startup loses more money than it brings in (whether it brings in $0 or $toolittle), it is extremely vulnerable to being bought and screwed over."
However, the premise that this only happens because the startup in question was "free" doesn't hold weight. Call me a cynic but the recommendation to use "paid-for" services only to avoid this outcome just seems a little too self-serving to paid-for-only service PinBoard (as excellent as it is).
I don't have an exhaustive list of startup acquisitions that were then shut down, but here's a few just from a Google acquisition list I found:
* PostRank was a paid-for blog data service Google acquired, shut down
* Jambool was a virtual gold payment processing system Google acquired, shut down
* Gizmo5 was a VOIP service Google acquired and shut down.
In some cases even if a company is taking money that alone still doesn't make it viable. In other cases, like PostRank and Jambool where the $$$ being paid by customers was probably significant, acquirers like Google have other circumstances where they'll shut a profitable businesses for a 'higher goal' in a bigger project.
I doubt Friendfeed makes Facebook any money, and was clearly a talent acquisition (Bret is their CTO now) but they still keep it running.
You're right that anyone using any tool/service with an unsustainable model needs to be cautious. But there's a lot more to it then is being proposed by the OP.
Bret Taylor (ex FF) is Facebook CTO, and clearly wants FF to keep running. Since it's cheap, who's going to tell him "no"?
But I mostly agree with him anyway.
I paid for and love pinboard. I will probably start paying for his page archival service within the next month. I'm more comfortable with it not only because of his track record so far, but because I know I am his customer. If it were a free service, I'd be far more concerned about how many concessions he'd be willing to make for his real customers -- advertisers or metrics companies or who-knows.
As the old saying goes, "If you're not paying, you're not the customer. You're the product." Kudos to Pinboard for asking you to become a customer, rather than settle in and be sold like a product.
Here's the original: http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#325604...
A self-sustaining product may still be sold. But if a product CAN'T sustain itself, it MUST either be sold, or shut down, eventually.
But I don't think charging your customers for your service means that you will never consider being acquired; I think it means that your exit strategy is to serve your customers with this great service you've built. It's the difference between a long-term strategy of "God I hope we get acquired" versus one of sustainability.
Sites that don't charge are floating on investor money, and investor money would really like to get oodles of money back eventually, instead of slowly growing a modest business that comfortably supports one or two people.
I don't have the link anymore, but there's an excellent essay that says exactly this using a metaphor about strip mining versus farming.
I realize the archival accounts are $25/year and I have no way of knowing how many they have but assuming it doubles their profits which I doubt they are still making less than $40k/year minus expenses.
I'm not huge on selling out but I would rather build a large app and flip it vs run a company that profits less than $40k/yr
(I did not double check my math so please forgive me if I rushed through this too fast)
[1] http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/10/spikes_logs_and_the_power_cl...
[1] http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/10/spikes_logs_and_the_power_cl...
If you are a moderator, feel free to delete the other comment (the one without any children).
"Today, Pinboard is Ceglowski's fulltime job, pulling in $250,000 in revenue over the past two years. He says the site has 25,000 registered users with about 18,000 active ones each month. Ceglowski's only costs are paying for server space, and Pinboard makes money by charging customers a one-time fee of $9.50. (The fee started at $2 and goes up a penny with every 400 people who sign up.) There's also a $25 a year archiving fee for people who want personal copies of links."
(http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...)
That's a problem because it makes it hard to rely on any new service, and that's eroding user trust. At least among people I talk to, there's a lot more skepticism about new stuff than there was a few years ago.
Purely consumer oriented entertainment kind of apps may be a different matter, but for anything else consumers are very apprehensive when there is any talk of losing access to an app they rely on. Unlike geeks, they can't just take some CSV dump and move their data elsewhere. For them, the UI is the data.
You may be annoyed about the tone in which some geeks complain about free apps going away, but don't let that mislead you into thinking geeks are the issue here. There is a huge issue and it's not opinionated geeks.
Could be an angle for big companies like IBM and Microsoft's cloud offerings, or at least that's what they're trying to push, with pitches of: come get something reliable from us, with guaranteed service that we'll actually honor and will still honor in 10 years, instead of some startup that might be dead or bought next year.
Why shouldn't people be upset when they would gladly pay to keep a service alive, but the silly creators decided not to let their customers pay out of some misguided hope for megariches?
This isn't about getting something for free. It's about the way you feel when somebody you love makes the same criminally idiotic mistake, over & over -- no matter what you do or say or how you try to help -- and ends up really hurting themselves AND others.
Like the whole Xmarks fiasco. The guy was totally against the idea of asking his customers to pay, and he had huge costs, so he announced he was going to shut it down.
Then his users revolted to such a degree that he finally decided to accept payments. And his customers paid up.
Result: Xmarks is still alive & appears to be thriving.
It would have simply fallen off the face of the earth, forever, if not for its devoted users getting angry enough to act.
You're telling me that if someone offered you $1-5 mil to lead a team at insert huge tech company here you'd turn it down? Bitch, please.
That chart is overall correct, but it's not like paying is suddenly going to be a panacea. I give flickr $25 a year, but I'm actively looking for replacements because it's obvious Yahoo!'s not gonna keep running it forever.
Do you get what I'm trying to say?
You might also want to tone down the snark.
I love Maciej and all of his body of work and I aim to give him many of my dollars in the future - but this is something I'm going to nitpick on.
The reason why I feel comfortable using Pinboard on a day to day has nothing to do with the fact that I've paid for it because it's just as fragile and likely to suddenly disappear. It has a high "hit-by-a-bus" factor.
It's because Maciej loudly proclaims his love for letting people export their data. That's it.
I just saw a post on Twitter from him about this: http://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/144174085629427714: "pals of mine have agreed to wind down the site in an orderly way and open-source the code if something happens to me"
That being said, I would still keep fairly regularly back-ups. With export this great, there's no excuse (short of maybe getting monthly back-up dumps delivered by email).
Recently we fielded an acquisition offer for Freckle. Just the app - no strings, no nasty jump back to being an employee, etc. It was for half a million dollars.
This gave us a lot to think about. Half a million wasn't enough. Was a million? Two?
And the conclusion we came to was: no. Not worth it. A good little SaaS like ours is a kind of a sinecure. We don't have to work much on Freckle at all and it keeps chugging along earning more and more every month. (And the more we work on it, the faster it grows. It's a choice we can make on a month by month basis.)
It would be damn foolish to sell it.
It was fun to think about. What would we do with a million dollars? But the fact is, within 3.5 or so years, Freckle would have brought in that much revenue anyway. And then it would KEEP bringing in more, forever.
I would definitely NOT take a $5 million offer if I had to be an employee.
I bet Maciej wouldn't either.
So… straight up your expected value was higher than the offered acquisition price ;).
If they offered you more revenue than you expected to make in 10 years, instead of 3.5, you might rethink the offer. Different strokes for different folks. Maybe in 3.5 years you'll be tired of that product in particular and you'll be looking for a better exit, etc, etc.
Maybe the employee position is really sweet. You never know how your own life changes.
And like I said, we could leave it alone and it would still continue to grow. There have been times, while we were still consulting, where we completely abandoned it for months (didn't even answer support emails) and it just chugged along.
These days when we're not adding features, we spend maybe 1 day a week on it, max. And we're adding features because I have big ambitions. We could just let it be and it would still earn very nicely.
When you get to the point of looking at $500k/yr of gross revenue forever, when would it make sense to give that up?
We could hire a full-time support person and let them handle it and still have about $400k net (taxable) left over after other expenses, basically forever. Doing nothing.
We could take $5 million but there's pretty much no way we'd get $400k of interest off it each year.
As for the employment offer being really sweet… there couldn't possibly be a job sweeter than what I've already got.
WELL… if you ain't busy growing, you're busy dying. It's not going to be Forever. Once your current customer acquisition rate drops, you'll start to lose revenue by just normal attrition.
Good luck to you, though! Sounds like an amazingly sweet gig you two have built and I wish you the best.
Thing is, you're right about attrition except for one thing: Freckle gains customers even when we neglect it entirely, through word of mouth. So it holds pretty steady even with total neglect.
The hard part is figuring out how to charge an arm and a leg for open source software. However, everyone take the easy way out by closing down on mission critical and open source the rest.
I thought of a possible solution that allow everyone to charge an arm and leg while still being open source, or even public domain. Mainly, I am inspired by the kickstarter idea, but I am less interested in curating projects for one time event and more interested in business model automation.
Here how it would works:
You have a webcomic and you have an ever expanding archive of past comic strips. However, the next comic strip, already finished, is not available. To make the comic strip available, you ask for a collective donation of 100 dollars. Some donate 1 dollars, others 20 dollars, until the money is raised. This ensure that you will get paid every step of the way while your comic archive acts as advertising.
The value for my users is the automation of numerous drudgery involved with the business model. That included tracking who donate what, tracking the deadline, the release, and so on. With an API for the service, people can get especially creative with how they release, or how they incentivize their customers.
Another twist to this idea is sponsorship by advertisers and allowing advertisers getting involved with the fundraising process. They can aid the fundraising in either matching user donations or offering discounts.
Of course, this will be just another idea if nobody took any effort in building the service and nobody will attempt this business model, easily. I am working on it, but it's more of a half-baked project on some private repos somewhere rather than a serious startup.
All my ransom are met, because I didn't have an extreme expectation that I was going to raise hundred of dollars at the beginning of the publication.
Compared to advertising, it performs far better in term of revenues. More importantly, it doesn't uglify your site or make your site worse unlike what advertising usually does.
How much better? I would need to perform manual collection to get these figures. With automation, I would be able to tell you, right down to 8 digit place.
The problem with this business model is that people doesn't do the work that allows them to reach their goal, or they have an extreme expectation of how much money they are going to raise. If you don't have the fanbase, you ain't going to raise much money.
It's not that it might work with a very small probability. It will works, to varying degree of success, depending on the popularity, how loyal your fans are, and so on.
I seen a writer who done the exact same thing, but I don't have the link handy. So, I know it works.
The more interesting question is how it will perform compared to other business models such as advertising, selling in dead tree format, merchandising, live performance, and so on, depending on the relevancy of each business model for particular industries. Like I said, advertising earn me money, but it perform terribly to how much money I can get by ransoming contents.
I think he meant "free as in beer", not "free as in speech".
While I agree with his argument (and I'm a pinboard customer), I am not for mixing the term 'free software' with 'free, unmodifiable, supported, centrally hosted web service'.
To me, free software means code sharing and the ability to modify software and run it personally as I choose. The difference boils down to resources. With free software I do get the source; however, I need to provide the environment, time, and self reliance support-wise (or a decent community).
lal
Great post, and glad to see a lot of other Hacker Newser following suit.
Using google to search doesn't make me a "product". They just happen to be able to make a ton of money showing adverts, which are useful for me also.
Ignore advertising revenue at your own cost.
But OTOH, this is hackernews, so continue hating advertising lead business models as usual...
No one is ignoring advertising revenue, harvesting millions of users in order to bring in said advertising revenue is the problem.
Why is it a problem? So they show me a few adverts... big whoop. I can just ignore them.
The issue is, the vast majority of people will never pay for access to online websites/apps (Me included). If you restrict yourself to the business model "charge users", then you've just got rid of 99% of the online population.
Advertising means that everyone gets what they want (Apart from the very very small but overly vocal minority that don't like adverts or have privacy concerns).
Only if you block them. Advertising is not informative, it's coaxing you, and just because you don't consciously decide you're going to read an ad now doesn't mean you get to ignore it.
Walk down a city street. It's full of adverts for shops you might want to go in.
On the other hand, while you claim my previous statement was BS, I claim your statement displays denial.
With many magazines, the only reason they even bother to charge is to prove to advertisers that you're a "serious" reader: they don't care about your subscription fee, but about what it says about your value as a product. This has even led to a weird cat-and-mouse game where magazines try to give away free promotional subscriptions while pretending they charged you, and advertisers respond by demanding that subscription numbers be audited by third parties so magazines have to prove that you "really" paid (and this produces complex legalistic rules about things like whether paying with frequent-flyer miles counts as paying). That's because they really want the "paid subscriber" bit to sell to their advertisers, but don't particularly care about your measly $20.
And yet every month, I get another issue, and another notice. I've longed chalked it up to trying to count me as a subscriber, and it must be working.
The kicker is, I've never once paid for this magazine.
Great post. Thanks for having the courage to state the truth, that most startup founders don't give a about users.
Is this a public secret. Do you think Steve Jobs was so obsessed with user experience because he cared about you personally?
So when one gets shut down, we all notice because so many of us had an account (even if we weren't using it.) Whereas when a paid service closes, it impacts only a tiny fraction of us in comparison, so we don't hear the same hue and cry.
The fact is that for a large company like Google or Amazon, the $$$ income from most small startup acquisitions (ads or paid) isn't large enough to be a factor in the decision to continue running that product. Either they believe that it's going to turn into a business that does tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in sales a year, or they don't and it's better to move those developers and resources off to a project that might.
I've seen this firsthand - I've had to fight to maintain services that were making lots of money with a few staffers, because a large company just didn't think they were worth the hassle of supporting from a legal and administrative perspective. And I understood that point of view from a management perspective, in many cases.
Best. Disclaimer. Ever.
Etherpad, for example, charged for it's product. You could use it for free, but if you wanted private pads and custom domains/urls you could upgrade to Pro. I don't see how "doesn't have a business model" applies to that.
All services eventually close, free and paid, but as long as you control your data, you can move when it happens. Knowing how to script something up to push the data to the new service is important too.
For example, I use Google Apps for my email. I'm not worry that it'll be closed tomorrow, but for all I know, some glitch might kill my account and Google's support isn't. So I got my own domain, I use an email client and keep very regular backups on everything. If it closed, my only loss would be the couple of hours while the MX records update.
His major point is that users regard bookmarking sites as a bank where they want their bookmarks safe and secure. I find that a pretty compelling difference.
So the statement still holds that if you don't pay for a product, you are the product.
And obviously Hacker News isn't going to be around for long...
I think the author is giving bad advice. If you're using a free service that doesn't appear to have any revenue stream, then just assume it won't be around when you need it. There's nothing bad about using a free service. You don't have to bug the owners to monetize. It's a technological fling. Just like with interpersonal relationships, a company isn't going to tell its users "Hey, we're not going to be around in 2 years. This is just a temporary thing."
Maybe Gowalla just wasn't that into its users.
Google didn't always have such an indisputable business model. Who knew search was so profitable? Would it have been as successful if it started charging users right off the bat, or covering the results pages with (irrelevant) ads before contextual ads were developed?
Sure ads don't always look the best but put say one small one and get some revenue started. Offer a premium account, even if the value proposition isn't great, even if it's just a cool badge for your use to say they are supporting the product, the users who love your product will probably take it up.
"Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won't do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you'll be the only game in town! "
If a free website service shuts down you can make your own.
Being competitive and ruthless may work financially but it isn't right and unlike a corporation in constant pursuit of profit an owner of a free website is free to act morally and avoid monetary perversion.
I'd prefer if websites were a little less stable than if the internet was exclusively for the rich by the rich.
I also don't think its the responsibility/right of the user to fix the business model of the company ("Make them charge you or show you ads.").
To me the "pump and dump" approach is perfectly legit. Just make sure nobody gets hurt. e.g. Allow customer to export their data. Companies aim to make money, not win a papal election.
Dear HN. Please charge me money or show ads. /s
It's probably because I totally don't get that "oh, their service is so good I want them charge more" mindset.
Delicious -> pinboard anyone ?
I think theres a pattern of products deteriorating after purchase for one reason or another, either not enough attention or founders leave or consumers find another product from a hot startup thats in the same space. While having a paid option should be encouraged, no service yet is something that I can't absolutely live without where theres a free alternative, and if theres something worth paying for, someone will build a free service.
I'd rather encourage users to turn off ad block on sites they like, and click on links that are relevant.
"We're just like service x, but we charge you money!"
There is no way this business model isn't a good idea.
Also the Disclaimer is a pure win
"DISCLAIMER: I run a paid bookmarking site. Every morning I wake up and dive into my vault of golden coins."
If a company can find a way to make money off ads and keep the product free, I'll gladly take that over paying a subscription fee.
I'd rather pay $5 - $50 for a mobile app than see ads.
Also, I will no longer tolerate advertizing in my paid content. Seems great, when do we start?
He means "free service", which is a radically different scenario from "free software" in either sense, and should be treated as such.
Whether we're talking about Free software or just freeware, the user's use of a normal piece of software on their computer doesn't suddenly disappear when the developer goes away.
But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources.
Nahhh. That can't be it.
Maybe when NaCL gets better...
Java bytecode is excellent precedent for what is broadly possible. There are problems with it, but most of what's missing for the end user is a better degree of convenience and control.
I think this is backwards for what they're trying to achieve, and I think that's part of the reason their app review process is such a pain in the ass.
"Free website" often means "hugely profitable website"
I think the number of unprofitable free websites vastly outnumber the "hugely profitable free websites".
Often in terms of websites that exist on the internet.
Rarely in terms of ones that are mentioned on hackernews.
A community evolves. And some of paid pinboard users switch to the free one because it's open source, some people implement some cool stuff periodically, it'll be maintained forever.
Another question: What happens when pinboard makes less money?
These questions were answered 30 years ago by OSS community.
Pinboard's long-term income is primarily from the archiving users. The storage and full-text search index would be even more expensive to host for free.
There are way better architectures to have an unsocial bookmarking service. Pinboard has the worst one and because its focus is to copy Delicious and make money. In other words, it creates the problem first, and gives users an expensive solution.
An open source solution that can kill Pinboard may be based on even DropBox. OSS community is good at solving real problems.
I don't think I ever have my browser not open. I use something like four different computers, not including mobile devices, and appreciate the central copy without having to think about syncing it. I don't worry about setting up scripts on my local machine or updating my local plain text copy so that it can be searched. For the archiving users, they don't have to manually save the files of each website they'd like to search later.
If you believe you can do bookmarking better and free, then do it. If it matches what I'm using Pinboard for, and is better (and doesn't use Dropbox), I'll switch.
I mean, a free Pinboard was a solution for me when I was looking for a good alternative of delicious, 2 years ago.
But it's not free. The owner claims that he'll keep maintaining forever but he will not when he lose a considerable percent of his customers.
And he'll. As I said, pinboard solves the wrong problem. An online bookmarking service can be structured in a way that will cost nothing. Couple of scripts that manipulate a text file on DropBox was the solution came to my mind in 3 seconds.
I don't expect Pinboard to be around forever, but it's useful enough while it's alive to be worth the money for me. When it's no longer useful, I'll still have a copy of my data to grep to my heart's content.
Kind of ironic, that I am still bookmarking this on Delicious.
Unless this mentality changes, expect all software to continue this cycle of froth and recycling.
no need for the user friendly, smart business models. no need to develop a new vision. this is the hack.
In every success story of pinboard, I'm very surprised to see how people are impressed from a carbon copy.
Let me introduce myself: I'm a guy who bookmarks everyday for 5 years, on delicious. After the Yahoo acquire, it was redesigned.
And I was annoyed. I started looking at the alternatives. Most of them were crappy except Pinboard. It was a good copy of old Delicious.
And I decided to use it just because it was a good copy of Delicious!
Then, I noticed that Pinboard is not free. And what it provides is nothing but keeping some text on a database. Same idea, almost same design but it's not free. Let the owner explain why it's not free: it's unsocial. and it'll be online unless a 90% percent of users keep paying it.
It's not ethical, Pinboard. If I think that it's not a waste of time, I'll code some scripts to store bookmarks in Dropbox for your users. It'll be under WTF PL license so that you can sell it.
Problem solved.