Pinboard - antisocial bookmarking | Hacker News Reader

Pinboard - antisocial bookmarking

pinboard.in

56 pointspstinnett41 comments

Hey, that's neat. Maciej Ceglowski and Joshua Schachter (founder of del.icio.us) are good friends. I recall what must have been five years ago when they would hang out on Freenode arguing how to design various projects like LOAF (http://loaf.cantbedone.org/about.htm#authors) and I'm sure del.icio.us. It'd be amazing to see some of that energy again in practice. My best wishes to this project.

I chime in from time to time but I'm not working on it.

The payment scheme is what interests me most. I can't even try it out and I'm seriously considering paying this guy a couple of dollars.

This is highly irrational behavior on my part considering there are dozens of free "social bookmarking" sites out there that certainly accomplish my very limited social bookmarking goals.

It reminds me of old carnival shows (or any nightclub with a line outside). Pay money to get inside. No preview up front. You're paying for exclusivity, mystery, and reputation instead of features.

Additionally, people who pay money for something often feel the need to justify the purchase to themselves and others. This will generally increase their happiness with the product and irrationally cause them to stick with the product through technical difficulties and feature shortages (humans are terrible at evaluating sunk costs). And because they have emotionally and financially invested in the company, there's a larger chance they will recommend this website to their friends, thus creating higher switching costs for themselves.

I'm interested to see how this pricing experiment turns out.

Nightly database backups to S3 (welcome, Ma.gnolia users!)

Too soon, guys.

Also, I believe Magnolia did do daily backups. They just weren't that good at it.

From what I can tell from watching Larry Halff's strange video interview on the Magnolia failure, they backed up a live, half-terabyte(!) database over firewire using rsync. That is, they copied the actual table data files while they were in use.

Pinboard uses good old-fashioned mysqldump instead.

That's not anti-social bookmarking. This is anti-social bookmarking: http://sm.purepistos.net/about

I went from browser bookmarks, to Delicious, to exploring (Magnolia, Simpy, etc.), to Diigo, to Selfmarks. A couple hundred bookmarks later, I haven't looked back; it's all I need.

Functional, usable demo at http://sm-demo.purepistos.net/ .

From the roadmap: "Get acquired by Yahoo and slowly grow useless" -- lol! :)

Who can resist rooting for software that declines to label itself in the old-fashioned "alpha" / "beta" way... and instead states clearly in the footer:

Too bad it's not going to get much test-driving: "Pinboard is free to use, but charges a small, one-time membership fee."

I was mostly intrigued by the payment model. As more users sign up, accounts cost more.

Ah, I didn't get that far - and was editing my comment before you posted.

Yes, an interesting (first-of-a-kind?) incentive to "sign up early." Wonder if any will sign up with so many free options around?

According to the website, the fee is (number of users * 0.001). Since the current fee is $2.91, the number of people who've signed up is around 2,910. Seems like at least a few people willing to throw in a few bucks to give it a shot. It'll be interesting to see what will happen to growth as the rate goes up and up.

The incentive for scalping will increase.

It seems that the fee should not be linear to the number of users.

Make it log(x) or something.

How much they've made so far, with scala:

  scala> def income(n_users:Int) = (1 to n_users) map(i => (i-1)*.001) reduceLeft(_+_)
 income: (Int)Double

  scala> income(2901)
 res0: Double = 4206.45

You need to round the intermediate values down like they seem to be doing.

Well, I believe the main point of that is as an anti-spam measure.

No. The main point is to make money. An anti-spam measure would have worked with everyone paying $0.10. This just grows too fast.

But it is an excellent business model. If you can get 1,000 users to sign up each month and if you have no significant problems with scaling (because you only store small amounts of text), then you will have no trouble paying all fees.

Really the main point was curiosity - Joshua suggested the idea, and I wanted to see if it had legs. I thought it would be a good way to control the rate of growth, fight spam, and limit the number of drive-by users while offsetting some hosting costs. To my surprise, it turned out to be a way to raise Y Combinator levels of funding, with the big bonus of not having to deal with Paul Graham. I wish I had had the foresight to write down my expectations before starting the experiment.

At least for me--someone unsatisfied with the bloatware del.icio.us has become, willing to try something new, and really not too fussed about a signup fee lower than MeFi's--the cost was actually an attraction. It says "We're serious" and "We want to keep out spammers", both of which are fairly crucial to a bookmarking service.

It also makes the site stand out: probably only URI shorteners are more common than social bookmarking services, and the increasing signup fee differentiates it from all the others (I doubt I'd have given it a second thought otherwise).

Well it doesn't scale that's for sure.

Hmmm... Only providing one password field seems like a road down which madness lies, even if it's unmasked as here.

We had an app where we'd ask for e-mail addresses. A lot of people mistyped their e-mail address, which was of course unmasked. As much as half of the non-activated accounts were do to a typo in the e-mail address. We now ask for the e-mail address twice, it made activation failures a lot less likely.

Thought experiment: How many people never sign up at all because you ask for email and password twice each?

Did you track how many fewer signups you get now that you have that double email? Are you net positive on the total activated users per day, adjusted for growth?

I have never aborted signing up because the form asked for the same information twice. Nor can I imagine doing so if it was obviously intended.

I could've done A/B testing and I could've done a full statistical analysis of the results. But I don't think splitting hairs like that is particularly useful. I simply had no reason to believe that it would affect our growth negatively, nor do I have such reason now. We are growing very, very fast.

But what I was really referring to was the customer service overhead. Almost every account that had a failed e-mail address would cause us some customer service. People creating another account which needed approval to prevent multiple accounts per user (which is cheating the game), or just asking questions. I cannot imagine people asking less questions if they paid for an account and can't access it.

I only mention it because users actually do behave strangely this way. Every field you show them loses a percentage of them. It's weird.

Here's an experience I had a couple years ago where a small tweak to remove a signup barrier more than doubled the number of people signing up:

http://twiddla.blogspot.com/2007/04/1000-signups-on-day-one....

A screenshot at least would be nice.

Found more info:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/06/back-to-basics-ditch-de...

http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/649/pinboard.png

is starring used for super important bookmarks?

Starring is used to select bookmarks for bulk operations (add tag/make private/mark as unread etc.)

Hm, wouldn't plain checkboxes suffice? That's a pretty entrenched convention. Not to mention that using stars in that way doesn't really mesh with that convention either. Is there some aspect of it I'm missing?

What about Google bookmarks? They are also private, you can export them and I suspect are backed up.

What about using Firefox's bookmarks sinced by Weave? Its private, its safe, it supports tags, it is easy acces the bookmarks through the awesome bar, etc.

I'm using Weave (just for bookmarks), and couldn't be happier. On any given day I might use a Windows PC at work, my Macbook Pro at work or at home, my wife's Windows laptop at home, or my main desktop at home which dual boots Vista and Leopard. Weave just works, and I have all my bookmarks synced on all of these computers.

7 hours ag it was $2.91, and about an hour ago it was $3.93? Not too bad. Would be cool if I could sell my username to someone when it's a hundred-odd bucks :D

Had a teensy bit o' cash to splurge, and signed up. Very clean look - Delicious-ish without the 'sociality'. Loved it so much I deleted my Delicious account (and now hoping Maciej doesn't pull a Zune Store!)

Also hoping last item in the roadmap's After That section comes kinda true, and Yahoo! is nice enough to refund at the same going rate (i.e. users * 0.001)

p.s: First time I've EVER paid for an online service, piddling amount though it may be..

p.p.s: Kidding about the roadmap last item thing - cash out by all means, but don't grow useless!

Thanks a lot! My hope is actually to operate the site as a going concern (with a paid version offering additional features). We saw what happened last time someone sold one of these bookmarking sites to a big company...