The Next Chapter | Hacker News Reader

The Next Chapter

blog.kippt.com

87 pointsjorde37 comments

This is shameless plug, but...

The startup that I'm at is working in a similar space. We're devoting a lot of resources to being able to easily search (from Google) your links, as well as share them. May be useful if you used Kippt, https://www.kifi.com/

Disclaimer: Again, I work there, but I really like what we are building. :)

Back in 2007, I built a "social search" Web app called CoReap, based on a similar concept. Unfortunately, I couldn't run it for long (and eventually pulled the plug) due to infrastructure issues. You can read about at http://coreap.wordpress.com

Best wishes to you guys! Drop me a message if you have any questions or need any help.

This is awesome – jealous I didn't think of it first. Well done.

Edit: Spoke to soon. Not a fan of sending every page I visit to you guys [1].

[1] https://www.kifi.com/privacy

(I work on Kifi)

Hear you loud and clear. We're working on a strategy so that it's not needed. Right now, that information is used only to determine if you or a friend has kept a page, or if you have previous conversations on the page.

Can't it just be a hash of the URI?

Unfortunately, that would often break. We've put a lot of effort into URL normalization (ie, http://smile.amazon.com/TP-Link-TL-WA701ND-150Mbps-Wireless-... is the same as http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002YETVVE/). When we can do "good enough" on the client so we can provide the same benefits, we'll do it. Or: provide a setting that forces URLs to exactly match, and we can use a bloom filter to keep traffic down.

This is really awesome! Something i've long been surprised that Google hasn't done yet - especially since i was a very avid Google Bookmarks user for a long time.

Thanks!

Good luck for your journey!

Kippt is a great product and Brian is very fortunate to have you guys join his team. And your talents will be multiplied at a place like Coinbase.

Congrats and best of luck.

I'm sad to see Kippt go. I've been an avid user for about a year now.

Can you comment on what led to this change? Inbound traffic looks like it's still pretty solid. Was it just that not enough people were converting to paid plans?

We never got to the level where things would have been profitable so the last year was mainly bootstrapping. Small bootstrapped business is also something we don't want to do forever so made the hard decision and move forward. It's hopefully needless to say that we're extremely happy about Coinbase.

Checked out the demo, looks great! I am sorry it didn't work out like you hoped, but I'm glad you landed in a nice spot.

Would you mind sharing your lessons learned? Such as, why you think it "failed" to take off like you hoped? What were your plans/expectations vs what actually happened? Any critical mistakes or major external factors which impeded success? Anything you would have done differently?

Thanks, and good luck in your new venture!

I second this, would love to learn what you thought worked and what didn't. Your product was beautiful and useful, was it mostly about market fit, business model or something unexpected.

Change is always good, whenever it happens. Success or failure is a relative thing in this world anyway.

I am just a user, somewhat technically savvy. Back in the days when new services were coming up frequently, all free for anyone to use; I had a feeling that this service is not going to go anywhere. Here you are few years later.

The business of letting people save bookmarks, tag, share, are long gone, and so are the services with them.

It's always sad to hear when an elegant and useful application like Kippt has to be more-or-less abandoned. Still, congrats to Karri and Jori for joining Coinbase, where their style and keen eyes will certainly do some good.

As for Kippt, does anyone have a good alternative? In the event it does get shutdown, breaks, or some other event occurs?

We are developing an app called pagebox.es with a different focus but which could be used as an alternative.

We have links, files and notes as well, but we'd like to get better at structuring and sharing other kinds of contents, and turn the collections into simple sharable databases with a friendly front.

Although I got to say that it isn't as elegant as Kippt and Sendtoinc, maybe someday ;)

Thanks Tanner and thank you for being our customer

Sad but not unexpected. Kippt has always felt like the kind of service that's nice and everybody likes but has a hard time getting any real traction. I'm sure being example site #1 on the official Bootstrap page was a good driver of traffic but sometimes the product just isn't vital enough.

Sorry to hear this. Kippt is a great product that I use almost daily. Thanks for keeping it open for a while and not shuttering immediately. Do you guys have a timeline for when you'll eventually take it offline?

For anyone looking for alternatives, my startup is working on something similar (share + chat what you find with your team: http://piethis.com

Just yesterday I was discussing with a friend how we haven't seen anything new in Kippt. I have been one of the first users of Kippt. Somehow the product was becoming slow for me. And I was not sure where the team and the product was headed.

Kippt helped me a lot with organizing things that I share. I hope this was a good journey for the Kippt team and I wish them all the very best for their future endeavor.

Congrats to Karri and Jori. Really enjoyed collaborating and helping out with developer resources while building FeedLeap. Best to both.

Oh, no! I loved my Kippt account. Sad to see it go, but I totally understand, it's hard to keep a project going without growth in the userbase.

Is there an export? I couldn't find it easily.

https://kippt.com/extras/export

What will become of sendtoinc.com?

They say in the post:

We'll continue to keep both Kippt and Inc running however the paid Kippt Pro plans will be discontinued. Inc will keep seeing small improvements, as a side project for us. We're committed to providing guidance and support to our user community during these transitions, so please feel free to contact us anytime.

/ I just became a customer.

We're keeping Inc up as a side project. If you need to get in touch, jori@sendtoinc.com

damn. I was uber hoping for a mobile app/ I was banking on you guys building one. argh.

Congrats either eway.

So sad :( Love Kippt!

That's some http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com material right there.

I'm all for light-hearted snark, but this doesn't call for it. They were honest about their failure, promised to keep their service going for people that still value it and then graciously moved on.

Not really. That blog is about whitewashing failure and disregard for user data while this company seems to be upfront about it and doing the best they can for customers.

Since the service is still up and users' data is respected, I don't think it really applies.

Have a look at that tumblr - it's not the day of acquisition announcement that matters here...

What would you write in the same circumstances?

Idk but I would try to avoid using the words 'journey' and 'humbling' at all costs.

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