Pinboard Turns Three | Hacker News Reader

Pinboard Turns Three

blog.pinboard.in

122 pointsurbanjunkie29 comments

Oh. This is a nice coincidence - I just wrote a paean to Pinboard as a great example of a product done well here [1]. (Okay, it's not really lyrical, just an everyday blog post)

This was just recently when Maciej just gave away the schema to the site! [2] I'm still reeling from the awesomeness of that move..

[1] http://shrik.theswamp.in/2012/07/youre-doing-it-right.html

[2] http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/06/do_it_yourself_bookmarking/

I thought about migrating my sporadic Delicious use over when it was $5. At some point I turned on a WordPress plugin to display recent bookmarks from Delicious and again considered migrating over when 404s started appearing in my feed, I think it was up to $7 by then. Finally Delicious was acquired and browser plugins and features started to smell bad so I paid $9. I'm sad it took me so long, not because the extra $4 was an issue but because I wasted far more of my time with an inferior product.

I set up an account in June 2009. Pinboard was the first bookmarking site I used, and as the owner says, the speed was the thing. No animated ads, blinking things or huge page load overhead.

Shortly after setting up the pinboard account, I moved the personal Web site off Wordpress back to static html. Pinboard provides the microblogging thing the way I like to do it.

http://idlewords.com/2009/09/how_to_not_get_your_blog_hacked...

(I don't use a local WordPress, huge overhead, I just use a few bash scripts).

Are your scripts online somewhere? As the creator of "frankenstein's ___.sh"[1] I am always looking at ways to improve it, mostly by peeking at other people's code.

[1] https://github.com/nicolasH/frankensteins

The best overall bookmarking experience I've ever had, in the browser or out.

Perfect? Of course not. More than good enough? Yes.

Try it.

It's interesting to contrast this post with all the posts about multi million dollar funding rounds currently on the front page.

It's refreshing, honestly. It seems to have more of a clear focus on real value to the user and it feels more like a labor of love and craft on the part of its creator, Mr. Cegłowski... its refreshing to see someone try to make something good rather than something that's simply sellable to VC's.

Now, admittedly, he's probably not getting rich off of the site – the exact number of paying users is hard to discern, but there are 7k more active users now than a year ago, so assuming 50% of people who buy in use it at least once every 30 days, then, conservatively, he's grossed somewhere north of 100k in the last year, right? Even if that's off by a factor of 2, it's not a killing – but it's real money as costs are likely reasonably low given the content he's serving and the low overhead such a small operation would require.

On top of that are the $25/year archival accounts. If 5% of all active users pay for archival accounts (that's a utter guess), that grosses another ~$29k/year. That's workable, definitely... but again, not a killing.

Pinboard has been nothing but a pleasure to use, for me and those I've introduced to it. I have to say that Maciej's joyful, honest, and frequent engagement with his users is a big part of that.

As an example, I remember the first time I misguidedly asked him if he used salted hashes for his passwords. He responded (and this was publicly, on Twitter) that yes, he did, but that it was nothing to be proud of, actually, and that he was going to be implementing bcrypt. It was from him that I belatedly learned how to properly store passwords.

Bravo to the decrease in downtime despite the increase in storage usage and diversity of active users like myself.

It looks like since I joined a couple years ago user acquisition has slowed down a bit, and the cost of operations might have gone up per active user.

2011 bookmarks/active user = 27M/16k = 1688 per user

2012 bookmarks/active user = 53M/23k = 2304 per user

2011 bytes archived/active user = 3.0T/16k = 197 megabytes per user

2012 bytes archived/active user = 5.9T/23k = 269 megabytes per user

2011 unique URLs/active user = 16M/16k = 1000 per user

2012 unique URLs/active user = 32M/23k = 1391 per user

% rate of change over previous year %

2011 2012

23.5M 26M bookmarks

65M 59M tags

13.2K 7K active users

2.8TB 2.9TB bytes archived

23h -7h downtime

13.5M 16M unique URLs

I heard of it, but never used it. I currently use delicious & google bookmarks. This sounds amazing, but site fails to show what export methods it has unless I sign up first. All it says is "You can export your bookmarks in a variety of formats". Could I import back to Google bookmarks or back to Delicious?

Pinboard can export Netscape-style HTML bookmarks, Delicious-compatible XML, and JSON. It can also import directly from Delicious, but I'm not sure about Google.

I tried and used many different bookmarking services, but in the long term ended up using none. Recently the need became apparent, though, and I signed up for Pinboard.

Pinboard is nice, but sadly, as much as I like it or admire its founder, I can't recommend it. Just because of the uptime. I don't think I'm a heavy user (have around 120 bookmarks since joining in March), however two times I couldn't save a bookmark because Pinboard was down.

This led to my realization that 1) the primary purpose of bookmark manager is to allow user to quickly save the page and forget about it, so uptime matters, although I took it for granted before, and that 2) reliability is (maybe the only) one nice thing about free services owned by a large faceless corporations.

I recommend historious (http://historio.us/).

Regular bookmarking workflow like in Pinboard or Delicious works fine for me, and full-text page search exists in Pinboard, I think. I just would like bookmarking service to be up when I save the page.

(It's not that bad if it's down when I try to access my bookmarks. If I were making my own bookmarking service, I'd probably make bookmarklet as independent as possible from the rest of the architecture.)

I still can't believe this model is working for this guy. $230k in 2 years is not bad for a paid-only service that people can find elsewhere for free.

Where can you find bookmarking with archiving for free? (don't say archive.org)

You have to add the $25/year archival users to that number too.

Where can you find bookmarking with archiving for free? (don't say archive.org)

I personally use evernote. Works well enough

Delicious and Pinterest don't let you see your old bookmarks?

Archiving as in the service also stores the content of the bookmarks, in case the original site goes down.

I signed up when Maciej first went public with it. Was that ever a good decision. I had been using del.icio.us since 2003 (again, signed up when joshu first opened it to the public). Importing my Delicious bookmarks was painless, and there was no friction whatsoever. Yes, actual users paying for software is a sustainable business.

Pinboard and Delibar kick ass. However I would like Delibar to save the bookmark to a temporary place if Pinboard is currently down. That would be ideal

Pinboard is absolutely wonderful. The only thing i'm still missing is a nice iPhone bookmarklet i can use to bookmark stuff on-the-go.

The normal bookmarklets work with mobile Safari. The trick is getting the JS on your phone. If you make a new bookmark (for any page) and then change the URL to the right JS, it should work. Originally I had to email the JS to myself, but now I have it up on pastebin.

http://pastebin.com/mwSYY8mu

Here's what I use:

Add the post-by-email email address to your contact list, then use the Send To button in Mobile Safari, type "p-i" and touch the pinboard completion.

I second that. Hopefuly Maciej will put some work in place soon.

I really enjoy using it! Congrats and thanks for the good work

I finally singed up yesterday. Couldn't be happier with it.

congrats! the best investment of (in my case) 9.13$ ever!

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