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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

I still can't figure out whether Pinboard is insane or genius for pricing it at ~$10/lifetime (or in this case $11/year). I've paid Dropbox about $480 now, and it's easily that valuable. But the amount of value I've derived from Pinboard is comparable.

The value is "You'll never lose this note, idea, or tool ever again in your entire life. Even if it goes offline, you'll still have a starting point for remembering that-thing-you-saw-years-ago-and-want-again."

There's a certain phenomenon in the gamedev industry that was discovered a few years ago. As you price something near zero, your sales increase more than linearly. You'd think that if you drop the price of a game from $50 to $5, you'd get 10x the sales. But in fact, you end up with much more. I wonder if something similar happens for Pinboard.

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A Pinboard user here. When I signed up I hoped there would be nice browser integration but it's just not there. UX for me is just rubbish compared to native bookmarking or to even old delicious extensions.

Honest question, why Pinboard is any better than using integrated Chrome bookmarks sync feature? (ignoring the archive feature of Pinboard)

Hm, would you expand on what you disliked about the integration? You're using the bookmarklet, right? I just click on "pin this" whenever I want to save the current webpage, and click on "my pinboard" whenever I want to look for a bookmark.

The killer feature for me is being able to type in a description for each bookmark, because later on you can search by any word in that description.

I've given up on tagging anything though.

Was definitely for me too, been lately using fetching.io for the same thing but without having to bookmark. No integration though with pinboard yet

That's interesting, I've almost given up on typing descriptions and instead have a very large number of tags that I pull up quickly with the autocomplete. It's funny how our use has gone in opposite direction. Pinboard is great for me, and I like the spartan, but functional, UI.

Yes I do, it's slow to load, there is no search from the browser (which is a show stopper for me), it's not as good as "Ctrl + D" kind of bookmarking that you have in Chrome.

And if it's not adding anything on to the bookmarking and comes with a worse UX, why bother?

It’s nice being able to keep bookmarks when switching browsers (at least it makes me feel less locked in).

It’s also nice being able to share bookmarks with your friends.

Both Firefox and Chrome allow importing bookmarks from other browsers, and exporting them as a plain HTML file.

Personally, I also don't see the point unless you're using the Archive feature. Firefox Sync is free, encrypted, and available even if the servers are offline.

In Safari, for "native" Pinboard integration across any browser connected via iCloud, I make a favorites bar folder with primary category tags as individual bookmarklets. This shows up as a dropdown menu in Safari UI for Favorites.

Then I can bookmark and tag anything into a primary category with a single click. The bookmarklets look like this:

    javascript:q=location.href;p=document.title;void(t=open('https://pinboard.in/add?later=yes&tags=vod&noui=yes&jump=close&url='+encodeURIComponent(q)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(p),'Pinboard','toolbar=no,width=100,height=100'));t.blur();

In addition to tagging the item, this is also archiving it for future reference. Don't ignore the archive, it's worth the $25 if you save even a single needed reference from bit rot.

It is actually the archiving that is the main benefit of Pinboard. Then tagging and commenting the links for yourself, in order make it easier for you to find it later. The goal is to keep there more than what you'd bookmark. The bookmark is for me "I expect I'll be visiting this often." The link in Pinboard is "my archive of the stuff I've once read on the web that I can need later to refer to, in the state it was as I've read it." That includes the content as it was at the time I've read it, not just the link. And I want to be able to comment it for myself and tag it to easily find it later. If you just need the bookmarks, use the bookmarks.

This is what I use Evernote for. Why do you like Pinboard better? (Not challenging--actually curious. I've never used Pinboard.)

I try to like Evernote, especially because I read a lot of PDF papers and annotated screen shots are nice, but I have 3000+ Pinboard bookmarks because they are just much, much easier and faster to create than Evernote notes.

I didn't understand what the fuss was about with Delicious and (later) Pinboard, and didn't start using Pinboard in earnest until a year or so ago, but now that I've got archiving running and full-text search, I have no idea what I would ever do without Pinboard.

Thanks. I use the Evernote "clipper" extension in my browsers, which lets me save either the URL, the article content, or the full web page to Evernote. I can tag them, and edit the text to include additional info (one frequent addition--a link to the HN discussion of that article).

I'm sort of in similar shoes in that I've been doing this for a while, so I've got hundreds of saved pages and dozens of tags in Evernote. So I feel like Pinboard would need to be much better to overcome that inertia.

I've never used Evernote but from their web site, it's a quite different service, Evernote is more like kind-of Google docs than what the Pinboard is (the "social bookmarking for the introverts" with the automatic archiving of the content behind the links).

Evernote premium is 5 EUR per month, that makes 60 EUR per year, v.s. cca 20 EUR per year for Pinboard Archive.

And Pinboard is much more minimalistic, and I like that: it doesn't force me to "install the apps" or whatever. I add the bookmarklet and I visit the Pinboard site, that's enough for all the devices I have.

evernote has a long history of data just magically dissapearing

What's wrong with the UX? Do you use the bookmarklet? I can't imagine how it could possibly get any more convenient than that.

One thing I've loved is that many iPhone Twitter and news apps have had Pinboard integration for ages. See something cool on Flipboard, tap a couple of buttons, and have it in my saved links later when I'm at my laptop. Pinboard actually goes one better with its Twitter integration: if I star a tweet, it gets saved to Pinboard. With all these sources, I use Pinboard as an inbox for everything I want to read later.

With iOS 8's share sheet extensions and a great native client that supports the feature, I can do this with almost all iPhone apps that don't already directly support Pinboard.

I find a simple webpage to be a better UI for bookmarks than the browser dropdown maze. I suppose it matters how you use bookmarks. If you use them to go to the same sites all of the time (something that I do not do) then I suppose having your common sites in a single drop-down is nicer. Although you could have a tag in Pinboard and make that your homepage.

What I use Pinboard for is bookmarking interesting articles I want to read later, recipes I want to try later, websites that are awesome but I want to visit infrequently etc. and the simple interface of Pinboard is perfect for that, imo.

You don't need to use the dropdown, you can open the bookmarks panel that shows a list and a search box.

In Firefox, you can even make it your homepage, just set it to: chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksPanel.xul

I don't see how that interface is nearly as good as Pinboard's. I guess we just have different tastes.

Whoever solves the linkrot problem will become very rich. Pinboard is a service that is eminently worth paying for. It's everything that del.icio.us was meant to be.

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