Clipboard officially open to the public | Hacker News Reader

Clipboard officially open to the public

blog.clipboard.com

63 pointspharkmillups60 comments

Have you consulted http://charmhq.com/ about the similarity between your logos?

We started using our logo about a year ago (which came from a great collaboration with the awesome Jackson Fish Market team). It's kind of unfortunate, but these things happens. We registered our trademarks quite some time ago, including the single logo. So, no, we did not consult with them nor they with us. We think they are good folks, and are inclined to live-and-let-live. So for me, as long as we are in very different spaces (which we are) I see it as mostly a non-issue.

Couple other comments/requests.

* Make clip deletion central to the app. Should be right there with "visit". Easy cleanup.

* All the clips should be the same size. Right now I clipped the name of a book and it is twice as large as full webpages I want to revisit.

* I'm sure it's on your roadmap but I'd like to be able to share from within the chrome extension without having to go back to the app.

* Also I'm sure it's on your roadmap but search should search the pages content as well if possible.

* Probably also on your roadmap but my main problems with bookmarks as they stand now are twofold. Organization and rediscovery.

You have a good start solving the organization problem and the rediscovery problem due to the visual nature of your solution. But what I really want is some sort of reminder about old bookmarks that I haven't viewed in X amount of days.

For all non starred bookmarks keep a last viewed count. If it's over 90 days or some determined amount add it to the list of bookmarks that are expiring. Have a little icon similar to the push notification icons on iOS alerting me how many expiring bookmarks I have. Have a place to click to see them all. Provide super easy management to archive, star, or do nothing. Autoarchive after 180 days. Still keep these around and searchable but in an "expand to see archived bookmarks" portion.

Help me keep my bookmarks relevant. Please :)

Not to detract from the great design and the obvious hard work put into this, but it isn't this basically violating copyright every time something is added unless you own it? Almost all of the public pictures I saw were copyrighted and I doubt the people adding them own the right to make copies or are able to give you permission to host them.

So this is like a public-facing Evernote? Crossed with Pinterest?

a) Needn't be public facing. b) You have much more flexibility to select the specific bit of HTML you want. c) Does a way better job of capturing the "live" DOM context. You aren't grabbing an image, you are grabbing text/structure/etc. d) Resembles Pinterest only in that you can make collections of things and share them with people. Unlike Pinterest, the point isn't just to show people stuff, but rather to harness something useful (you are grabbing bits of structured data).

Can you elaborate on the "structured data" and how it's gonna be useful? To the average user, it seems like the biggest value proposition here is the ability to keep your posts private. For those who don't need to keep things private, how is it better than using Pinterest?

You can clip almost arbitrary parts of web pages. See http://clipboard.com/gary/boards/examples for a whole bunch. This makes a big difference because instead of simply having pretty pictures of food, you can save actual recipes and search over ingredients. You'll probably find http://clipboard.com/category/Programming interesting as well.

I poked around and wasn't able to find a way to export my structured data (RSS, API, something). This is admittedly something that would initially only appeal to a very select few users, but would enable both much richer users of the data and at least the beginnings of an ecosystem around your product.

Also, and this is not to be negative, but I have been burnt repeatedly by bookmarking/clip services going out of business and while I wish you the best of luck a _key_ aspect of trying a new one is that they do not act as a roach motel for my data.

I'm just happy not having clips made of PNG's with painful fonts/colours/sizes that don't work on my phone/console/monitor/whatever.

You should add a link to Clipboard.com from your blog.

Whoops. We reskinned the blog late last night and missed this. Thanks for the tip, I've already updated the blog.

Can you make the front page slideshow stop if I click a link? It moves on faster than I can study the pictures.

Is there an easier way to clipboard a page bookmark rather than hovering around the border of the page until the "page bookmark" text appears and clicking?

Also if I retroactively try and remove tags from a clip that fails. I can only add tags (seemingly).

Finally feature request... I would love to be able to have subtags #books #fiction. Maybe #books > fiction > fantasy or something. But only have one top level tag "books" and then have a subcategory organized under the #books tag. Collapse all the entries for a subtag or something.

Hi Sattiso, this is great feedback. I've noted your feature request for consideration in our future product roadmap.

Hi, currently the only way to bookmark a whole page is to hover around the edge, we felt this was the simplest way to allow clipping part of a page and the whole page easily without having to toggle some kind of mode. If you have any ideas on how you would like to change this feature, let us know.

You can add/update and remove tags from clips. What's the error you are seeing (or does it not show an error and just doesn't remove the tag when you refresh the page?) Can you send me info to mark@clipboard.com

Tag categories is something we have discussed and would definitely be a useful feature in the future.

Thanks Mark.

Yeah it just doesn't remove it when I remove the tag and hit enter then refresh.

This.

1. I am a self-proclaimed geek & although i love the nifty way to clip only parts of a page is awesome, its confusing, even to me.

2. About being able to share whole page easily & quickly Amdahl's law ( focus on the common case, 80% of use) would say there should be a fast, frictionless way to accomplish clipping of the entire webpage(which i believe is clipboard's common case)

Now a -ve of doing this would be to increase complexity - 2 options - either clip entire page or parts of a page.

But, you can do this with a well designed ui element.

3. i made this point on the beta launch hn thread, a lot of content consumption (article reading) happens on the ipad.

feature request : find neat content (from the clipboard corpus, twitter, fb, g+, prisimatic)

the clipboard ipad apps then, download a list of the top 'n'(configurable param) of articles on hn,twitter,fb, g+, to either a. locally on ipad, so can be viewed w/o a n/w connection (reading on train, public transit usecase) b. to my clipboard a/c on the cloud c. both a & b

please on your front page, provide a 1-line description and a compelling reason for a newbie to start using your product. I read so much faster than waiting for video to load and then watch. thx.

Oh, there's no way to get from your blog to your product.

Not sure if it was just added, but there's a "go to clipboard.com" link in the upper right.

Yes. At the zoom level that's comfortable to read for me it disappears, which is why I didn't see it.

You're correct, we missed that when I updated the blog to a new look last night. We've already rolled out a fix. Sorry about that!

One of the few sites released in the last few years that I actually find useful! Great job team this is really going to help me save content/bookmarks in a more friendly and searchable manner. I've wanted something like this forever.

My only question is.... how are you monetizing it? The browser extension can track my entire browser history. Are you uploading it to your servers?

I think this is a great question (privacy concerns.)

Chrome instills fear into me when it announces that a plugin can gain access to my data (that's an instant put off for me.) I still don't actually get just what data a Chrome plugin has access to.

Plugins+Extensions are terrifying and awesome simultaneously.

When that warning says "all your data on all of your websites" it f'ing means it.

Imagine the extension as a person on a computer in a remote location who is looking through every web page that you visit and taking actions on your behalf.

Different extensions might:

- Look through the content of a page and find things that are likely phone numbers and make them Skype links

- Select sections of a page and push their content to a server (ala Clipboard)

- Check if you're on a banking site, append an iframe of the site to itself and transfer funds out of your account.

It's the web browser equivalent of downloading a program onto your desktop, once it is installed (sandboxing aside) it can do quite a bit.

That doesn't sound good at all! I guess they can update themselves automatically. Who vets the plugin ecosystem?

No - I know the browser extension warning is kind of scary, but we never access your history.

And if you'd rather not take my word for it, you can use the bookmarklet instead of the extension. It has all the same functionality and runs in a much tighter sandbox.

Speaking of monetization...they acquired Clipmarks.com which predates even the defunct Google Notebook (and possibly Digg). Clipmarks.com - although popular among certain crowd - never made it big and had to rely on Ads until they gave up.

So I don't see why the Clipboard isn't going the same route.

As a former Clipmarks.com user, I have no intention to rely on any such clipping services for the daily curation I do (lately only for myself).

I told Eric Goldstein (Clipmarks.com) a long time ago that you should run the website like a head editor of a newspaper and not let everyone show whatever they're clipping on the front page of the site.

Curation based service sites have a front face which makes or breaks the adoption by those who pass by.

If you let your front face show whatever the heck people are clipping (for the sake of democracy and due to popular vote counts, a la Digg), you are letting the perception of your site go to garbage.

The perception Pinterest generated proves my point.

A visitor should be able to tell what kind of audience hangs out at such curation sites. Pinterest generated a perception of design, aesthetic, shopping etc. Its front page is well curated with a goal. Clipboard doesn't give that impression, and nor does any such clones of Pinterest.

I am not defending Pinterest over others (I don't use Pinterest), but people need to realize what they're missing when they run en mass after a successful formula.

There are so many such Pinterest-look alike sites showing up lately and besides copying the front page design, none seems to be offering anything of substance, or a reason for anyone to anchor their curations.

I think this is an interesting point. I'm not sure how you censor your front page. I personally don't really care what's there, but you could quite easily offend, and scare people away from the service.

Editing is not censoring.

I have no idea what they are doing, but i do know this: Uploading your browser history is not exactly a monitization strategy.

With an installed extension it would be much, much easier to just inject any ads they want onto any page you visit, or get a sponsor to skin their UI (think Pandora), or put ads in your pin board, or....

If turning amorphous data like browser history into cash was easy, Facebook would be making a lot lot lot more money.

Congrats to gwf and his team. I've been using clipboard from the earliest days and had a very small consulting input back in what you could call alpha. I can say that it is truly a great tool for people looking to curate data for themselves, groups of people and/or the general public.

I can't wait to watch their meteoric ascent.

I've been using Clipboard for a long time now, and know several people who built the site. It's an amazing team and they did an amazing job with it. It would be easy to be discouraged with hotness of Pinterest, but they're going at it from a different, very valuable direction.

Best of luck to the Clipboard team!

What's the difference between this and Pinterest?

In my opinion: you're clipping content + structure, and not just something like images/text. So you get to preserve the original layout, links, etc, which is a huge benefit.

You can also have things private and/or shared with a select group of people, which is what I usually do.

For example, a common use case I've found is that I'll clip something from Gilt/other signup required sites, to show someone a deal they might be interested in, but they don't want to sign up just to look at it. If they like it, they end up signing up.

Thanks for that.

So the clips aren't totally live - if you are sharing content that is somehow walled off.

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Your clips can be private and shared with a few people (or none), or they can be completely public. In the example I gave, I wouldn't really mind if they were public, but I don't see a reason to make them public - it is just to share with a few friends, really.

I might have misunderstood the product. I assumed (though this would be tough), that when you took a snippet of a page, and say the page updated later on - the snippet would reflect the change.

You make it sound like the snippets are static caches of content.

Yes, that's my understanding as well. That's also what I want. I'm taking a snapshot in time of a page, so that I can then go back to that snapshot and look at it.

Sometimes those snapshots are not valuable after a while, so I delete them :)

Upon actually using it, it's pretty much snip.it but even more difficult to read. I think Snip.it and Pinterest are not very well designed around their primary purpose - content - but posts that can span 900px high of illegible text is pretty bad, especially when you scroll a little bit more and it's just posted again by someone else.

For whatever reason, I just wrote another post about features and ways to distinguish this product from the competition in their other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4049752).

I like snip.it's design and content fairly well, and it works quite simply. The only thing wrong with it right now is a relative lack of breadth of topics represented on the front page due to the proclivities of early adopters. That will improve in time.

i like what i see, unfortunately for me, i have so much data/notes on Evernote, and organised so well, that i'm locked in the product. for me swapping services right now would be a real nightmare

I was impressed with the idea in the video, I have signed up, and tried to clip a picture on Quora with Chrome plug-in. I selected rectangular area. Alas, my clip is empty on Clipboard.com :(. You lost a user.

For me it was the fact that it did not work without third party cookies.

Hi - you can add an exception just for clipboard.com, not for all sites, which is what I did.

Here's the thing ... we don't actually need 3rd party cookies. However, in most browsers you need to have 3rd party cookies enabled in order to read client local storage (not a cookie!) within an iframe that's in a different domain. We so this to digitally sign the API calls so that malicious 3rd party sites can neither spoof nor read the shared secret used for the digital signature.

So the irony is that we make our API calls digitally signed (more secure) but to do so from the context of a bookmarklet you have to enable 3rd party cookies because browsers bundle that switch to the capability that we really need (i.e., there is no "enable loading of cross domain iframes that can read client local storage securely" option because its unfortunately pairs with 3rd party cookies).

I'm sure they have bugs still to work out and that they have plenty of users who find enough value out of what they're building as to not be so easily deterred.

Although you were impressed, clearly you don't actually value the service highly (as I don't think there is a similar service that performs better) so I don't think they lost much.

I don't know how, but your Clip-bookmarklet totally killed my browser. Had to force-kill it. Chrome 18.

Will try the extension for now.

After I clip something, I keep clicking the 'saved' green tag expecting it to take me to the new clip. Just a thought.

As big as pinterest is, I feel there is still many opportunities left in this space

Very well designed site. Who made your intro video? Great work!

Grumo Media, Vancouver BC. We had a great experience with Miguel and team. grumomediaDOTcom.

Can I delete clips?

Nevermind. You click on the clip first, and then you get the option to delete it.

Wouldn't it be better to have email notifications turned off as default? That could get very annoying...

Lovely sign up UI. And a very neat web app.

How do you delete an account?

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