10 ms·

Ideas that have been beaten to death

63 points by rukshn 5y ago

omgmajk 5y ago
I pay for Pocket, it's been my main bookmarking tool for years ever since Feedly got too intricate for my needs. I was a founding member of Feedly when Google Reader went down but it got too many features and too complicated for my taste.
tedmiston 5y ago
There are plenty of good paid bookmarking services. Pinboard is popular around here.
antholeole 5y ago
Idea* that has been beaten to death :) From a consumer perspective, a product has to be 10x better for me to pay for it. There’s simply no way to make a bookmarking app that’s 10x better - there’s just not that much room for improvement.
- rukshn 5y ago
  Author here, I took the bookmarking idea as an example. But there are plenty of ideas such as this, for example todo lists etc
- marban 5y ago
  You have to sell a worldview in these areas, not 10x or whatever better-ness.
rchaves 5y ago
Oh I’ve been building one! But mine is truly different™, basically I gave up the idea of organizing bookmarks, in favor of searching them instead, building your personal search engine In fact I’ve been blogging about it as I build it https://omnindex.substack.com/ https://omnindex.substack.com/
- rukshn 5y ago
  Is it something offline? How does it index the pages you visit?
  - rchaves 5y ago
    no it would be online, not the pages you visit but the ones you bookmark, I’m thinking of building a browser extension that watch your bookmarks and sends the links to be scrapped and indexed
mbgerring 5y ago
Pinboard is the clear winner in this market, as evidenced by the fact that Pinboard acquired at least one other defunct bookmarking site.
- marban 5y ago
  I'm all for functionality-first but Pinboard's UI is ugly to the point of ignorance.
d--b 5y ago
Well you could say the same about todo lists. Yet a lot of people make money with todo lists. I am sure there are some people making money with bookmarking somewhere…
- ArcMex 5y ago
  Yet, todo lists are about keep tracking of items you will tick off. They are no meant to be perpetual. Bookmarks can be. I have bookmarked intranet systems for that exact reason.
bryans 5y ago
The problem with bookmarking overall is that it's very easy to click a button to save it for later, but very little of it ends up actually being read. It's basically a nice-to-have list, if there were infinite time and we had infinite energy. But we have neither, so we end up developing personal folder systems or installing extensions or utilizing SaaS, all in the hope that the links won't be dead by the time we can actually read them. The lack of adoption for paid services (and lack of development for better in-browser functionality) is just our acceptance and recognition that the things we bookmark don't really matter. Any site that matters to you, you'll remember. Any site that you forget about but may need to bring up later, you can just as easily google for. And anything else is generally irrelevant or accepted as ephemeral, even if slightly stimulating.
- sodimel 5y ago
  > you can just as easily google for I can't find most of the links I saved by using a search engine, and I think that's part of the problem.
  - rukshn 5y ago
    I think the core part of this bookmark problem and dilemma is the fact that browsers execute their bookmarking functionality poorly.
    - srcreigh 5y ago
      Why would Google ever implement decent bookmarks aka local search for all your data? They need to track you for their business.
      - rukshn 5y ago
        Yes that is true of course. But at least forks of Chrome, FF, can try to implement a decent bookmarking feature in their browser. Maybe FF is not doing it because they own pocket. But true there is conflict of interest that I didn't see until I read your comment.
mynameismon 5y ago
A very interesting solution that has worked for me is...Zotero. Zotero + the web connector basically allows me to do a lot of things that are usually only achieved with paid products. For example, full text search, saving HTML copies offline, linking related websites, adding tags and notes, all of this (and more) is possible.
- reactspa 5y ago
  Very interesting. If you've found a good enough way to import Chrome bookmarks into Zotero, please share how you do it. (Ignore if you haven't, or don't use Chrome). Thanks.
  - mynameismon 5y ago
    I haven't been able to do so, but considering Zotero uses a SQLite file, and Chrome uses a JSON file, you could hook up a Python script to carry all of them over.
jonathanstrange 5y ago
The problem with bookmarking applications is that aside from a few websites you visit regularly, browsing and searching your bookmarks isn't going to be substantially different from browsing and searching the web, so you can just as well do the latter. If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we're at it). Whatever you come up in terms of search, however, has to directly compete with the quality of Google's search engine.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  > If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we're at it). Hence the list of bookmarking apps mentioned, :p. I think they're all trying to solve this problem in one way or another.
- Someone 5y ago
  > If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks What about: - browser saves content of each bookmark - browser’s search bar searches both existing bookmarks _and_ queries the user’s configured search engine - browser shows results (not too many) from bookmarks above the search engine’s ones (in place of its adverts and removing duplicates would be better, but that might lead to lawsuits about tampering with web pages/deteriorating search results) Maybe, your browser should also search your entire hard disk, email, etc?
  - fellowniusmonk 5y ago
    Opera used to do this and I can confirm it was awesome, haven't used Opera since v12 so I don't know anymore. Made the switch back in the day because chrome's process isolation and js engine made it overall faster and more stable.
- tga 5y ago
  Well, your bookmarks form a _very very_ small web, with only pages that are guaranteed to be interesting to you. You're inadvertently hinting towards an elegant solution: forget about trying to organize bookmarks. Instead, just hit a button to add that page to your micro-web, and later only use Google-like full text search for retrieving things. It's the content search part that browsers are missing -- can anyone confirm whether Raindrop or other bookmarking services do it well?
locallost 5y ago
I agree with the last point. > Finally there is no problem to be solved in the first place. And everyone is creating a solution in search of a problem. Personally I stopped using bookmarks except for something temporary that I use multiple times a day for a short period of time (e.g. work related notes, designs etc). The more general purpose solution is, well, Google because at the end of the day you will have a huge bookmark list that you will have to search through anyway.
srcreigh 5y ago
Competitors to any bookmarking product include: social media / Reddit / HN, messaging / Slack, and of course Google. I used Google to find an old tweet of mine to get a link to an old product today. It was very easy. Any specific bookmarking app adds an extra step to any URL you would record on any other website in its context. So the solution is basically amounts to organizing uncontextualized URLs (hard to remember anyways) or make a somewhat useless record when there's a more contextualized record elsewhere. A better tool would be something which captures URLs in their context. Like dated list of HN posts/comments I upvoted. Dated list of interactions with Jira. Etc. Same thing with Spotify Liked Songs. That's basically bookmarks for songs. It's just A) better integration and B) social-it is it's own contextualization.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
The other idea / product that has been beaten to death would be note taking, todo lists, and similar... illusory productivity tools. I say illusory because writing down notes and tasks feels like you're being productive, but they really aren't. I think these are really popular to be built because they are simple in terms of technology. Most early developers can fit the concept of a todo list in their head - it's what a lot of examples are made of. And once that technical thing is solved, the emphasis is on design.
- GEBBL 5y ago
  Hmm, I would say the process of note taking is an important part of my retention. I refer to my notes a lot. I worked with a guy who never took notes and was able to remember everything. I’m not that smart!
  - WJW 5y ago
    I think the GP referred more to those people who write down a lot but (almost) never refer to their notes or review them. For many people, after several years they will have a giant repository of hundreds or thousands of notes with very poor organization and the value decreases rapidly because they can't find anything anymore.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      Note taking is a memorization ritual for some people. Notes taken but not reviewed have still done their job if it helps the person remember.
      - eloisius 5y ago
        That’s true for me, but I’ve found that the easier and more streamlined my note-taking apparatus is, the less effective it is at helping my memory to congeal. I just keep a scrap of paper handy and jot stuff down occasionally. I’m trying out a Techo this year, so that’s a step more sophisticated. Handwriting seems to be the important bit for me.
jonwinstanley 5y ago
Could it be that bookmarking is something people often think they need, but actually, even if they remember to bookmark something they will rarely revisit their bookmarks. What people really need is a way of recalling instantly every snippet of information from every website they have ever visited on any device in a timely fashion. Which sounds tricky to implement.
- rukshn 5y ago
  Yes that is so true, the extension I made for Chrome changes the new tab page of your browser to all the links you saved. I did it because even I used to bookmark stuff but then forgets all about it. So having it sticking out to your face every time when you open a new tab will at least make you go out and read it.
  - jonwinstanley 5y ago
    Nice. Does it just show the most recent or pick some oldies from the archive too?
- dkersten 5y ago
  My problem with bookmarking has always been that they quickly become just as unwieldy as not having things bookmarked, so finding a bookmarked item becomes really difficult. Plus I forget what I have bookmarked so when I want to read a thing again I don’t think to check the bookmarks. So I’ve largely stopped using them and just use it as a giant “to browse through again eventually” list instead.
  - jonwinstanley 5y ago
    Haha totally. I don’t bookmark anything anymore. I use Pocket so that if ever I’m out of network I’ve got a collection of interesting articles to read but rarely remember to do that either.
    - kwhitefoot 5y ago
jdrc 5y ago
As someone who has created a bookmarking app tailored to my needs only (and used only by me apparently), i m not sure i agree with the spirit And the author seems to forget about pinterest
- jorisboris 5y ago
  Pinterest indeed! Though specifically for visuals!
- rukshn 5y ago
  What’s unique about your solution?
  - jdrc 5y ago
    i wanted to save with a single click and keep a link to the referring page . you can check at https://pinplz.com https://pinplz.com
reactspa 5y ago
100% agree that bookmarks need a better solution. Whoever does it will change the game. I'm a bookmarks hoarder. If I encounter a useful site, I bookmark it. I have about 20,000 bookmarks on Chrome now. Someone on HN once described bookmarks as a "knowledge graph". That's an apt description for what they do for me. I've long given-up trying to neatly organize my bookmarks in folders. Now I use lots of keywords (as pseudo-tags) while saving a bookmark, with the hope that I'll be able to use the correct keywords later when looking for the bookmark. I would, however, like save them neatly in folders. In case someone from the Chrome team is reading this, some features that would really change the game for us bookmark hoarders are: 1. bookmarks search: allow us to search exclusively within a folder. 2. bookmarks search: option to search only folder names. 3. when saving a bookmark, give us a search box we can use to search folder names, and then quickly identify and pick a folder to save the bookmark in. 4. tags for bookmark (similar to tags in Gmail).
- ArcMex 5y ago
  20,000? And pseudo-tags system has scaled to accommodate them? I converted some to "Web Apps" (Linux Mint)
- rotten 5y ago
  Why do you have to create the folders for your bookmarks yourself? Can you use a classification AI to automatically put the bookmarks in a variety of categories based on the contents of the page? You would then only need to add tags such as "read this on the weekend", "send to my wife later when I'm not at work" or "use this one in my upcoming blog post". Otherwise, having them organized would be really handy when you are browsing your bookmarks or trying to find something you saw a few months back but can't remember the right keywords for it to show up in a search again.
- tconfrey 5y ago
  If you are interested, check out my bookmarker extension BrainTool. For #3 BT makes it easy to save pages into a folder hierarchy with autocomplete and a tree view. All saved items have associated text notes (which could be #tags) and everything is incrementally searchable, approximating #1 and #4. #2 is an interesting, I'll think about it! This short video gives you the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9kg9yVMMAM&list=PLhaw8BE1kin1D9uPrY9yF-KoBoWisbBaP&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9kg9yVMMAM&list=PLhaw8BE1ki...
ArcMex 5y ago
"Will I need to reference this website later on?": Bookmark it That's my only criterion.
davedx 5y ago
Crypto
LittlePeter 5y ago
I pay for Pinboard. I have 5K bookmarks and daily add about 1-10 new ones. I will never read most of them. But when push comes to shove, I can easily find that BioTech article that generated a lot of discussion on HN because I tagged it as "hn" and "biotech". And if that article disappears from the web, Pinboard should still have a cached version. So now I can bookmark an article close tab #231 and fall asleep peacefully.
- Arubis 5y ago
  Pinboard is great! It works everywhere, it’s super simple, and it means I can find stuff later. For anyone looking for a “Read Later” option, [Paperback](https://readpaperback.com/ https://readpaperback.com/) is lovely as well, like Instapaper before all the bullshit.
cortexio 5y ago
zh3 5y ago
Local approach is a personal wiki; just drag the page to be 'bookmarked' into a relevant page on the wiki (or just a '/tmp' page for later sorting). I generally add the page title as the link name, makes for easy searching later. For example, I'd file this story as:- * [https://ruky.me/2022/02/01/ideas-that-have-been-beaten-to-death/ Ideas that been beaten to death] (ruky.me) ** [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166357 HN discussion (2022)] This shows up as a list of link in the wiki output:- * [Ideas that been beaten to death] (ruky.me) * [HN discussion (2022)] The link for HN comments is so often used I've got it in a dedicated F key :)
dorwi 5y ago
Isn't bookmarking == hoarding? Somehow I have the feeling that sure, maybe one day that niche bookmarked piece of information will be useful (or fun), but it gets buried by many other useless bits, so there's a chance it'll never be actually used. So no thanks, I don't want to pay to rent an extra organisational unit, and feed my obsession.
- leokennis 5y ago
  Of course digital artifacts take up no space and are easily searchable. So personally I dump a ton of stuff into https://raindrop.io https://raindrop.io should I ever need it again (which is seldom).
727564797069706 5y ago
I've tried many products and approaches – until I landed on https://raindrop.io https://raindrop.io. That's my favorite tool now for capturing videos, bookmarks, articles, etc content. Totally worth the price - especially due to the permanent copies. There have been multiple times where the content disappeared from online shortly after I found it, but since Raindrop.io had a backup, I got to read it still. My closing words: Stop searching for the best manager and make Raindrop.io your new friend :) DISCLAIMER: I'm in no way connected to the service nor will I receive anything for endorsing it. I'm just a really happy customer.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
giorgioz 5y ago
> Bookmarking is broken in all browsers The author suggests bookmarking is broken in all browsers. I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome. I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar. If I have to click on the >> arrows to expand I might just as well Google it. So yes my simpler guess is that browsers bookmarking is indeed good enough.
- causi 5y ago
  I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome. I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar. That's like saying "I'm pretty happy with the address bar. I try to only click links and avoid ever typing in a URL."
  - giorgioz 5y ago
    No it's not. It's a conscious minimalist choice. My booksmark bar in Chrome fits 18 links. There is more links than the websites I use daily or even monthly. I think having more links than that it's HOARDING. You have the feeling of creating value by saving the links but in practice you won't use most of them and anyway you have history and search to help you out. Chrome even remove the bookmark bar by default. You have to add it back. That is to say Bookmarks is for power users and the most powerful ones are probably just being collectionist rather than pragmatist.
    - causi 5y ago
      You're just not a bookmark user. Many people are, and Chrome is a much worse browser for those people than, say, Firefox where you can display a persistent bookmarks column. I have a folder with a couple dozen bookmarks of webcomics I read. I have a bookmarks folder with studies and papers regarding points of contentious online discussion I can reference without relying on Google. I have a folder of blogs I enjoy. I have a folder of bookmarks for various projects I find interesting, and every couple of weekends I pick one and give it my best shot. I have a folder of reference pages and sales pages for my project car. in practice you won't use most of them No, you won't use most of them. Because you're not a bookmarks user.
jhkiehna 5y ago
He states that bookmarks in browsers are "broken" but doesn't elaborate. I've never felt this way, Anyone know what he's talking about?
- maze-le 5y ago
  For me they are just piling up. I usually don't delete them and have a seemingly endless list on all of my "bookmark folders" that just keeps on growing -- after a few years some url schemas change or sites go down and the bookmarks don't work any longer.
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    I usually clear mine by a system reinstall and forgetting about them. No Firefox I don't actually want you to stick them in an account forever. The weight of my unfinished projects is crushing.
- JohnDeHope 5y ago
  My biggest issue is that they don't interoperate across browsers. The idea that I would use a single browser is crazy. I don't use a single browser on one device on any of the devices I use. If the browsers treated themselves less like silos, people would be more encouraged to use them for this sort of note taking.
  - tehbeard 5y ago
    > The idea that I would use a single browser is crazy Honestly, and as someone who uses >1 browser, you are an outlier. For the vast majority, you click the "beachball" or the "red fox" and that's how you internet. And among those that use >1 browser, I don't want bookmarks or other stuff interoped/shared. I'm specifically using seperate browsers to keep things seperate. I don't know how well Firefox Pocket works, but Google seems to have no issue keeping bookmarks between phone and desktops synced just fine.
  - jamesmaniscalco 5y ago
    I have had a good experience with the browser plugin floccus, which I use to sync bookmarks to a self-hosted NextCloud instance. It has cross browser support. I have a 'sync' folder that is shared across all browsers/devices, as well as local-only bookmarks on each device (home/work/mobile/etc.)
timoth3y 5y ago
Alternate Take: - Bookmarking is not broken. Bookmarking works just fine. What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do. We don't know why we really make those bookmarks. Bookmarking is not broken. We are.
- brk 5y ago
  You just clarified so many things for me.
- NAHWheatCracker 5y ago
  This is what I was thinking as well. I find bookmarks work just fine for me in Firefox. However, it only works well for the 10 bookmarks that I use weekly. If I bookmark anything and I don't use it soon after, it inevitably languishes. I have dozens of bookmarks from years ago for lectures I wanted to watch, tutorials I wanted to follow, games that I wanted to play, blog posts that I wanted to read. It was a list of things I wanted to be or do, but haven't taken the time. A bookmarking tool can't change whether I have follow through. It's a tool to keep track of things, but I have to spend the time.
- throwamon 5y ago
  For me I often feel it's a refusal to accept that life is short and I'll never have time to explore every single thing that has ever interested me in enough depth, and that no matter how much I learn and explore in the time I do have, I'll never be satisfied. So I keep on piling bookmarks on top of bookmarks and thus avoid having to choose what I will intently dedicate my time to. I gotta bookmark this comment and review it later. Keywords: digital gardening, data hoarding, Buddhism, hedonic treadmill.
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    > For me I often feel it's a refusal to accept that life is short and I'll never have time to explore every single thing that has ever interested me in enough depth, and that no matter how much I learn and explore in the time I do have, I'll never be satisfied I love your comment and share your approach: my bookmarks are what will pop up if I search something before Bing tries to take me somewhere else. By bookmarking, I both accept that I do not have the time (not now or ever) and therefore I may never read this, unless serendipity or need drives me to type the exact same keywoard > I gotta bookmark this comment and review it later No, as that would be an attachment: instead, you should let this comment go :)
tconfrey 5y ago
Guilty as charged! I'm building my own 'unique' take on bookmarks[0] (really it is unique ;-) . I think the reason this comes up is that people have more and more stuff to keep track of, and more and more of peoples stuff is accessed in a browser. Not so long ago there were standalone apps for email, word processing, spreadsheets, group chat, bug tracking, CRM etc etc. Now all of that stuff is inside some web app I get to in Chrome - me all all the other billion+ knowledge workers using Chromium. Thats why everyone has 50 tabs open at any given time. When almost everything I want to track has a unique URL it opens up possibilities and the browser builders have not been keeping pace. [0] https://braintool.org https://braintool.org
hliyan 5y ago
My theory: the larger your bookmark collection grows, the more indistinguishable it becomes from Google. It basically becomes a curated search index. The closest I have come to using bookmarks is through Firefox address bar suggestions from my browsing history.
- mitchdoogle 5y ago
  This is exactly how I've come to use bookmarks. Thanks to Firefox's ability to tag bookmarks, I can add a few tags each time I make one and then a few months down the road when I want to find something I've seen before, I will just search in the address bar (begin with * to search bookmarks). It's been working very well for me.
- zenkat 5y ago
  But Google indexes the whole web. I want a search that works just over the articles I've read. "What was that article I read a few months back that talked about why you should be able to explain why a fence exists before tearing it down?". It works be perfect for the discussion I'm having with my team right now, but I can't remember the name of the stupid law or where I came across it . Google is useless in these situations. I need an index contained by my prior search history. Had anyone built this yet?
  - minutillo 5y ago
    Chesterton's fence.
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    Chromium and Firefox have, in the form of a sqlite database. You can and should use it. Even if you don't directly, typing in the address bar usually plucks from your bookmarks first.
    - rhn_mk1 5y ago
      Firefox only matches the page title and the URL, plus the search box doesn't allow querying by time. Those are the two most common things I need from my bookmark storage.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
elb2020 5y ago
I feel that the solution to this would be some kind of generic online storage solution. Like Excel, but for the whole web, where you can put any kind of data in, get an address (a web-ified pointer) to it, and be sure that you can look it up again at any time, from anywhere, using the address key. A generic online storage system with Excel-like properties. If that existed, then people would use it for bookmarks, and probably also for a host of other types of online storage needs.
benlumen 5y ago
I don't know about everyone else, but I usually bookmark to read later. I built a simple bookmarking webapp for this while in university over 10 years ago, pre-Pocket, even. The thing is, I usually don't read it later. Next time you bookmark something to read later, or send it to yourself, or whatever you do - maybe stop and ask: am I actually ever going to open this again? Chances are you're reading articles to procrastinate, and if it's too long or not interesting enough to read even then, bookmarking it is just procrastinating on the procrastination.
15charslong 5y ago
So basically I tried to solve the 'Bookmark Problem' by creating a simple user focused search engine, user builds a list of bookmarks, and the app, Mrkff, allows you to search your bookmarks as if it were google, but tailored to your own content. If you would allow me to plug my own personal bookmarking app - Mrkff [0] - pronounced `Mark off`. I went through YC in 2019 for it, and I launched it in 2020. I also built a cross-platform web-extension for it too using a small framework (Desolate-Zero) I made for the web extensions to make use of all the features of both chrome and firefox. It just a simple click extension and click bookmark and the server takes care of the rest. Basically I opted to make a full-text searchable version of every webpage I bookmark. A copy is also stored on the server, I intended to paywall downloading the actual webpage text, but make it searchable in the free version. This way I can search for obscure words or phrases that were on the webpage that I remembered while not remembering the actual webpage. I had an auto tag system on it too derived from the actual text of the web page. V2 is set to expand from text to video, pdf, audio etc. I had a lot of fun with it, but this version is lacking in certain aspects, and I've spent the last 6 months working on version 2 of this app. I certainly didn't know how widespread this type of app was to be honest. But I use my solution on the daily, so I'll probably continue working on it. [0] - https://mrkff.com https://mrkff.com
- csdvrx 5y ago
  Have you considered B2B? A lot of small companies would love shared bookmarks to have some employees discover more easily things that were previously bookmarked by other employees.
  - 15charslong 5y ago
    Like a shared knowledge base? I hadn't thought about it like this before, but thank you. As I'm writing this all the possibilities are just flooding my mind. I will be looking into this for V2. Thank you so very much.
    - csdvrx 5y ago
      give me your email and let's talk :) I can try to introduce you to first potential clients. This way you'll confirm product market fit. Think simple: even something that could just ingest bookmarks from chrome/edge sqlite database and process them into a custom search engine (that would NOT expose said links to say google, even if they are public links) using good old tf-idf would be extremely valuable.
bradhe 5y ago
Photo organization apps were exactly this back in like 2012.
yoyohello13 5y ago
I feel like an outlier in that I find bookmarks extremely useful. When I start a new project, I create a bookmark folder related to that project. I bookmark any web references I looked at during the course of that project. Then later I can remember "Oh yeah I did something like this in X project." and go peruse those bookmarks. I actually find it pretty fun to go back to old project folders and checkout what kind of stuff I bookmarked in the past.
perrygeo 5y ago
Bookmarks projects fail to be interesting because simply recording a list of links (maybe with folders or tags or some other categorization method) is something anyone can do trivially in a text file. They add no value because they only focus on the easiest part - simply capturing the link. My bookmarks.txt file is just as easy to use and requires only a text editor. I can sync it multiple computers, organize and search it any way I want, back it up, add notes, etc. In many ways a text file is a vast improvement over the existing solutions. If you really want to make a good bookmark app, you need to understand that the act of bookmarking, organizing bookmarks, and using bookmarks are three completely separate activities. When you create a bookmark, you want minimal interaction - click the star, maybe add a tag, and move on. When you're organizing bookmarks you want to review and restructure what you've already bookmarked into folders, a mindmap, etc. while taking into account the content behind each link. When you're using bookmarks, you want to leverage that existing organization scheme to find what you want quickly. Most bookmark features/plugins are decent at the first step of capturing the link, but are terrible at or completely ignore the rest. I would love to see a bookmark app that was designed in the spirit of "Getting Things Done" - where ideas are captured quickly but then funneled into a system where they are later reviewed regularly and acted upon. Just capturing a list of bookmarks and regurgitating them to the user is not sufficient and can be easily replaced with a text file.
bambax 5y ago
> What do you think? I think you've never heard of Pinboard. Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard, it will crush you.
kaashmonee 5y ago
I did expect more than 1 idea though in a post titled "Ideas that have been beaten to death"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

63 points by rukshn 5y ago

I pay for Pocket, it's been my main bookmarking tool for years ever since Feedly got too intricate for my needs. I was a founding member of Feedly when Google Reader went down but it got too many features and too complicated for my taste.

tedmiston 5y ago

There are plenty of good paid bookmarking services. Pinboard is popular around here.

antholeole 5y ago

Idea* that has been beaten to death :) From a consumer perspective, a product has to be 10x better for me to pay for it. There’s simply no way to make a bookmarking app that’s 10x better - there’s just not that much room for improvement.

rukshn 5y ago
Author here, I took the bookmarking idea as an example. But there are plenty of ideas such as this, for example todo lists etc
marban 5y ago
You have to sell a worldview in these areas, not 10x or whatever better-ness.

rchaves 5y ago

Oh I’ve been building one! But mine is truly different™, basically I gave up the idea of organizing bookmarks, in favor of searching them instead, building your personal search engine In fact I’ve been blogging about it as I build it https://omnindex.substack.com/ https://omnindex.substack.com/

rukshn 5y ago
Is it something offline? How does it index the pages you visit?
- rchaves 5y ago
  no it would be online, not the pages you visit but the ones you bookmark, I’m thinking of building a browser extension that watch your bookmarks and sends the links to be scrapped and indexed

mbgerring 5y ago

Pinboard is the clear winner in this market, as evidenced by the fact that Pinboard acquired at least one other defunct bookmarking site.

marban 5y ago
I'm all for functionality-first but Pinboard's UI is ugly to the point of ignorance.

d--b 5y ago

Well you could say the same about todo lists. Yet a lot of people make money with todo lists. I am sure there are some people making money with bookmarking somewhere…

ArcMex 5y ago
Yet, todo lists are about keep tracking of items you will tick off. They are no meant to be perpetual. Bookmarks can be. I have bookmarked intranet systems for that exact reason.

bryans 5y ago

The problem with bookmarking overall is that it's very easy to click a button to save it for later, but very little of it ends up actually being read. It's basically a nice-to-have list, if there were infinite time and we had infinite energy. But we have neither, so we end up developing personal folder systems or installing extensions or utilizing SaaS, all in the hope that the links won't be dead by the time we can actually read them. The lack of adoption for paid services (and lack of development for better in-browser functionality) is just our acceptance and recognition that the things we bookmark don't really matter. Any site that matters to you, you'll remember. Any site that you forget about but may need to bring up later, you can just as easily google for. And anything else is generally irrelevant or accepted as ephemeral, even if slightly stimulating.

sodimel 5y ago
> you can just as easily google for I can't find most of the links I saved by using a search engine, and I think that's part of the problem.
- rukshn 5y ago
  I think the core part of this bookmark problem and dilemma is the fact that browsers execute their bookmarking functionality poorly.
  - srcreigh 5y ago
    Why would Google ever implement decent bookmarks aka local search for all your data? They need to track you for their business.
    - rukshn 5y ago
      Yes that is true of course. But at least forks of Chrome, FF, can try to implement a decent bookmarking feature in their browser. Maybe FF is not doing it because they own pocket. But true there is conflict of interest that I didn't see until I read your comment.

mynameismon 5y ago

A very interesting solution that has worked for me is...Zotero. Zotero + the web connector basically allows me to do a lot of things that are usually only achieved with paid products. For example, full text search, saving HTML copies offline, linking related websites, adding tags and notes, all of this (and more) is possible.

reactspa 5y ago
Very interesting. If you've found a good enough way to import Chrome bookmarks into Zotero, please share how you do it. (Ignore if you haven't, or don't use Chrome). Thanks.
- mynameismon 5y ago
  I haven't been able to do so, but considering Zotero uses a SQLite file, and Chrome uses a JSON file, you could hook up a Python script to carry all of them over.

jonathanstrange 5y ago

The problem with bookmarking applications is that aside from a few websites you visit regularly, browsing and searching your bookmarks isn't going to be substantially different from browsing and searching the web, so you can just as well do the latter. If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we're at it). Whatever you come up in terms of search, however, has to directly compete with the quality of Google's search engine.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
> If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we're at it). Hence the list of bookmarking apps mentioned, :p. I think they're all trying to solve this problem in one way or another.
Someone 5y ago
> If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks What about: - browser saves content of each bookmark - browser’s search bar searches both existing bookmarks _and_ queries the user’s configured search engine - browser shows results (not too many) from bookmarks above the search engine’s ones (in place of its adverts and removing duplicates would be better, but that might lead to lawsuits about tampering with web pages/deteriorating search results) Maybe, your browser should also search your entire hard disk, email, etc?
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  Opera used to do this and I can confirm it was awesome, haven't used Opera since v12 so I don't know anymore. Made the switch back in the day because chrome's process isolation and js engine made it overall faster and more stable.
tga 5y ago
Well, your bookmarks form a _very very_ small web, with only pages that are guaranteed to be interesting to you. You're inadvertently hinting towards an elegant solution: forget about trying to organize bookmarks. Instead, just hit a button to add that page to your micro-web, and later only use Google-like full text search for retrieving things. It's the content search part that browsers are missing -- can anyone confirm whether Raindrop or other bookmarking services do it well?

locallost 5y ago

I agree with the last point. > Finally there is no problem to be solved in the first place. And everyone is creating a solution in search of a problem. Personally I stopped using bookmarks except for something temporary that I use multiple times a day for a short period of time (e.g. work related notes, designs etc). The more general purpose solution is, well, Google because at the end of the day you will have a huge bookmark list that you will have to search through anyway.

srcreigh 5y ago

Competitors to any bookmarking product include: social media / Reddit / HN, messaging / Slack, and of course Google. I used Google to find an old tweet of mine to get a link to an old product today. It was very easy. Any specific bookmarking app adds an extra step to any URL you would record on any other website in its context. So the solution is basically amounts to organizing uncontextualized URLs (hard to remember anyways) or make a somewhat useless record when there's a more contextualized record elsewhere. A better tool would be something which captures URLs in their context. Like dated list of HN posts/comments I upvoted. Dated list of interactions with Jira. Etc. Same thing with Spotify Liked Songs. That's basically bookmarks for songs. It's just A) better integration and B) social-it is it's own contextualization.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

The other idea / product that has been beaten to death would be note taking, todo lists, and similar... illusory productivity tools. I say illusory because writing down notes and tasks feels like you're being productive, but they really aren't. I think these are really popular to be built because they are simple in terms of technology. Most early developers can fit the concept of a todo list in their head - it's what a lot of examples are made of. And once that technical thing is solved, the emphasis is on design.

GEBBL 5y ago
Hmm, I would say the process of note taking is an important part of my retention. I refer to my notes a lot. I worked with a guy who never took notes and was able to remember everything. I’m not that smart!
- WJW 5y ago
  I think the GP referred more to those people who write down a lot but (almost) never refer to their notes or review them. For many people, after several years they will have a giant repository of hundreds or thousands of notes with very poor organization and the value decreases rapidly because they can't find anything anymore.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    Note taking is a memorization ritual for some people. Notes taken but not reviewed have still done their job if it helps the person remember.
    - eloisius 5y ago
      That’s true for me, but I’ve found that the easier and more streamlined my note-taking apparatus is, the less effective it is at helping my memory to congeal. I just keep a scrap of paper handy and jot stuff down occasionally. I’m trying out a Techo this year, so that’s a step more sophisticated. Handwriting seems to be the important bit for me.

jonwinstanley 5y ago

Could it be that bookmarking is something people often think they need, but actually, even if they remember to bookmark something they will rarely revisit their bookmarks. What people really need is a way of recalling instantly every snippet of information from every website they have ever visited on any device in a timely fashion. Which sounds tricky to implement.

rukshn 5y ago
Yes that is so true, the extension I made for Chrome changes the new tab page of your browser to all the links you saved. I did it because even I used to bookmark stuff but then forgets all about it. So having it sticking out to your face every time when you open a new tab will at least make you go out and read it.
- jonwinstanley 5y ago
  Nice. Does it just show the most recent or pick some oldies from the archive too?
dkersten 5y ago
My problem with bookmarking has always been that they quickly become just as unwieldy as not having things bookmarked, so finding a bookmarked item becomes really difficult. Plus I forget what I have bookmarked so when I want to read a thing again I don’t think to check the bookmarks. So I’ve largely stopped using them and just use it as a giant “to browse through again eventually” list instead.
- jonwinstanley 5y ago
  Haha totally. I don’t bookmark anything anymore. I use Pocket so that if ever I’m out of network I’ve got a collection of interesting articles to read but rarely remember to do that either.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago

jdrc 5y ago

As someone who has created a bookmarking app tailored to my needs only (and used only by me apparently), i m not sure i agree with the spirit And the author seems to forget about pinterest

jorisboris 5y ago
Pinterest indeed! Though specifically for visuals!
rukshn 5y ago
What’s unique about your solution?
- jdrc 5y ago
  i wanted to save with a single click and keep a link to the referring page . you can check at https://pinplz.com https://pinplz.com

reactspa 5y ago

100% agree that bookmarks need a better solution. Whoever does it will change the game. I'm a bookmarks hoarder. If I encounter a useful site, I bookmark it. I have about 20,000 bookmarks on Chrome now. Someone on HN once described bookmarks as a "knowledge graph". That's an apt description for what they do for me. I've long given-up trying to neatly organize my bookmarks in folders. Now I use lots of keywords (as pseudo-tags) while saving a bookmark, with the hope that I'll be able to use the correct keywords later when looking for the bookmark. I would, however, like save them neatly in folders. In case someone from the Chrome team is reading this, some features that would really change the game for us bookmark hoarders are: 1. bookmarks search: allow us to search exclusively within a folder. 2. bookmarks search: option to search only folder names. 3. when saving a bookmark, give us a search box we can use to search folder names, and then quickly identify and pick a folder to save the bookmark in. 4. tags for bookmark (similar to tags in Gmail).

ArcMex 5y ago
20,000? And pseudo-tags system has scaled to accommodate them? I converted some to "Web Apps" (Linux Mint)
rotten 5y ago
Why do you have to create the folders for your bookmarks yourself? Can you use a classification AI to automatically put the bookmarks in a variety of categories based on the contents of the page? You would then only need to add tags such as "read this on the weekend", "send to my wife later when I'm not at work" or "use this one in my upcoming blog post". Otherwise, having them organized would be really handy when you are browsing your bookmarks or trying to find something you saw a few months back but can't remember the right keywords for it to show up in a search again.
tconfrey 5y ago
If you are interested, check out my bookmarker extension BrainTool. For #3 BT makes it easy to save pages into a folder hierarchy with autocomplete and a tree view. All saved items have associated text notes (which could be #tags) and everything is incrementally searchable, approximating #1 and #4. #2 is an interesting, I'll think about it! This short video gives you the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9kg9yVMMAM&list=PLhaw8BE1kin1D9uPrY9yF-KoBoWisbBaP&index=4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9kg9yVMMAM&list=PLhaw8BE1ki...

ArcMex 5y ago

"Will I need to reference this website later on?": Bookmark it That's my only criterion.

davedx 5y ago

Crypto

LittlePeter 5y ago

I pay for Pinboard. I have 5K bookmarks and daily add about 1-10 new ones. I will never read most of them. But when push comes to shove, I can easily find that BioTech article that generated a lot of discussion on HN because I tagged it as "hn" and "biotech". And if that article disappears from the web, Pinboard should still have a cached version. So now I can bookmark an article close tab #231 and fall asleep peacefully.

Arubis 5y ago
Pinboard is great! It works everywhere, it’s super simple, and it means I can find stuff later. For anyone looking for a “Read Later” option, [Paperback](https://readpaperback.com/ https://readpaperback.com/) is lovely as well, like Instapaper before all the bullshit.

cortexio 5y ago

zh3 5y ago

Local approach is a personal wiki; just drag the page to be 'bookmarked' into a relevant page on the wiki (or just a '/tmp' page for later sorting). I generally add the page title as the link name, makes for easy searching later. For example, I'd file this story as:- * [https://ruky.me/2022/02/01/ideas-that-have-been-beaten-to-death/ Ideas that been beaten to death] (ruky.me) ** [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30166357 HN discussion (2022)] This shows up as a list of link in the wiki output:- * [Ideas that been beaten to death] (ruky.me) * [HN discussion (2022)] The link for HN comments is so often used I've got it in a dedicated F key :)

dorwi 5y ago

Isn't bookmarking == hoarding? Somehow I have the feeling that sure, maybe one day that niche bookmarked piece of information will be useful (or fun), but it gets buried by many other useless bits, so there's a chance it'll never be actually used. So no thanks, I don't want to pay to rent an extra organisational unit, and feed my obsession.

leokennis 5y ago
Of course digital artifacts take up no space and are easily searchable. So personally I dump a ton of stuff into https://raindrop.io https://raindrop.io should I ever need it again (which is seldom).

727564797069706 5y ago

I've tried many products and approaches – until I landed on https://raindrop.io https://raindrop.io. That's my favorite tool now for capturing videos, bookmarks, articles, etc content. Totally worth the price - especially due to the permanent copies. There have been multiple times where the content disappeared from online shortly after I found it, but since Raindrop.io had a backup, I got to read it still. My closing words: Stop searching for the best manager and make Raindrop.io your new friend :) DISCLAIMER: I'm in no way connected to the service nor will I receive anything for endorsing it. I'm just a really happy customer.

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giorgioz 5y ago

> Bookmarking is broken in all browsers The author suggests bookmarking is broken in all browsers. I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome. I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar. If I have to click on the >> arrows to expand I might just as well Google it. So yes my simpler guess is that browsers bookmarking is indeed good enough.

causi 5y ago
I'm personally pretty happy with the bookmarking on Chrome. I try to stick with only enough links to be visible in the Bookmarks bar. That's like saying "I'm pretty happy with the address bar. I try to only click links and avoid ever typing in a URL."
- giorgioz 5y ago
  No it's not. It's a conscious minimalist choice. My booksmark bar in Chrome fits 18 links. There is more links than the websites I use daily or even monthly. I think having more links than that it's HOARDING. You have the feeling of creating value by saving the links but in practice you won't use most of them and anyway you have history and search to help you out. Chrome even remove the bookmark bar by default. You have to add it back. That is to say Bookmarks is for power users and the most powerful ones are probably just being collectionist rather than pragmatist.
  - causi 5y ago
    You're just not a bookmark user. Many people are, and Chrome is a much worse browser for those people than, say, Firefox where you can display a persistent bookmarks column. I have a folder with a couple dozen bookmarks of webcomics I read. I have a bookmarks folder with studies and papers regarding points of contentious online discussion I can reference without relying on Google. I have a folder of blogs I enjoy. I have a folder of bookmarks for various projects I find interesting, and every couple of weekends I pick one and give it my best shot. I have a folder of reference pages and sales pages for my project car. in practice you won't use most of them No, you won't use most of them. Because you're not a bookmarks user.

jhkiehna 5y ago

He states that bookmarks in browsers are "broken" but doesn't elaborate. I've never felt this way, Anyone know what he's talking about?

maze-le 5y ago
For me they are just piling up. I usually don't delete them and have a seemingly endless list on all of my "bookmark folders" that just keeps on growing -- after a few years some url schemas change or sites go down and the bookmarks don't work any longer.
- ganzuul 5y ago
  I usually clear mine by a system reinstall and forgetting about them. No Firefox I don't actually want you to stick them in an account forever. The weight of my unfinished projects is crushing.
JohnDeHope 5y ago
My biggest issue is that they don't interoperate across browsers. The idea that I would use a single browser is crazy. I don't use a single browser on one device on any of the devices I use. If the browsers treated themselves less like silos, people would be more encouraged to use them for this sort of note taking.
- tehbeard 5y ago
  > The idea that I would use a single browser is crazy Honestly, and as someone who uses >1 browser, you are an outlier. For the vast majority, you click the "beachball" or the "red fox" and that's how you internet. And among those that use >1 browser, I don't want bookmarks or other stuff interoped/shared. I'm specifically using seperate browsers to keep things seperate. I don't know how well Firefox Pocket works, but Google seems to have no issue keeping bookmarks between phone and desktops synced just fine.
- jamesmaniscalco 5y ago
  I have had a good experience with the browser plugin floccus, which I use to sync bookmarks to a self-hosted NextCloud instance. It has cross browser support. I have a 'sync' folder that is shared across all browsers/devices, as well as local-only bookmarks on each device (home/work/mobile/etc.)

timoth3y 5y ago

Alternate Take: - Bookmarking is not broken. Bookmarking works just fine. What's broken is what we want to do with the bookmarks once we have them. The problem is we don't know exactly what that is. We tell ourselves that it's to "review it later", but that's not really it. It it were it would be simple to block out some time and do that, but we never actually do. We don't know why we really make those bookmarks. Bookmarking is not broken. We are.

brk 5y ago
You just clarified so many things for me.
NAHWheatCracker 5y ago
This is what I was thinking as well. I find bookmarks work just fine for me in Firefox. However, it only works well for the 10 bookmarks that I use weekly. If I bookmark anything and I don't use it soon after, it inevitably languishes. I have dozens of bookmarks from years ago for lectures I wanted to watch, tutorials I wanted to follow, games that I wanted to play, blog posts that I wanted to read. It was a list of things I wanted to be or do, but haven't taken the time. A bookmarking tool can't change whether I have follow through. It's a tool to keep track of things, but I have to spend the time.
throwamon 5y ago
For me I often feel it's a refusal to accept that life is short and I'll never have time to explore every single thing that has ever interested me in enough depth, and that no matter how much I learn and explore in the time I do have, I'll never be satisfied. So I keep on piling bookmarks on top of bookmarks and thus avoid having to choose what I will intently dedicate my time to. I gotta bookmark this comment and review it later. Keywords: digital gardening, data hoarding, Buddhism, hedonic treadmill.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > For me I often feel it's a refusal to accept that life is short and I'll never have time to explore every single thing that has ever interested me in enough depth, and that no matter how much I learn and explore in the time I do have, I'll never be satisfied I love your comment and share your approach: my bookmarks are what will pop up if I search something before Bing tries to take me somewhere else. By bookmarking, I both accept that I do not have the time (not now or ever) and therefore I may never read this, unless serendipity or need drives me to type the exact same keywoard > I gotta bookmark this comment and review it later No, as that would be an attachment: instead, you should let this comment go :)

tconfrey 5y ago

Guilty as charged! I'm building my own 'unique' take on bookmarks[0] (really it is unique ;-) . I think the reason this comes up is that people have more and more stuff to keep track of, and more and more of peoples stuff is accessed in a browser. Not so long ago there were standalone apps for email, word processing, spreadsheets, group chat, bug tracking, CRM etc etc. Now all of that stuff is inside some web app I get to in Chrome - me all all the other billion+ knowledge workers using Chromium. Thats why everyone has 50 tabs open at any given time. When almost everything I want to track has a unique URL it opens up possibilities and the browser builders have not been keeping pace. [0] https://braintool.org https://braintool.org

hliyan 5y ago

My theory: the larger your bookmark collection grows, the more indistinguishable it becomes from Google. It basically becomes a curated search index. The closest I have come to using bookmarks is through Firefox address bar suggestions from my browsing history.

mitchdoogle 5y ago
This is exactly how I've come to use bookmarks. Thanks to Firefox's ability to tag bookmarks, I can add a few tags each time I make one and then a few months down the road when I want to find something I've seen before, I will just search in the address bar (begin with * to search bookmarks). It's been working very well for me.
zenkat 5y ago
But Google indexes the whole web. I want a search that works just over the articles I've read. "What was that article I read a few months back that talked about why you should be able to explain why a fence exists before tearing it down?". It works be perfect for the discussion I'm having with my team right now, but I can't remember the name of the stupid law or where I came across it . Google is useless in these situations. I need an index contained by my prior search history. Had anyone built this yet?
- minutillo 5y ago
  Chesterton's fence.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  Chromium and Firefox have, in the form of a sqlite database. You can and should use it. Even if you don't directly, typing in the address bar usually plucks from your bookmarks first.
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    Firefox only matches the page title and the URL, plus the search box doesn't allow querying by time. Those are the two most common things I need from my bookmark storage.

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elb2020 5y ago

I feel that the solution to this would be some kind of generic online storage solution. Like Excel, but for the whole web, where you can put any kind of data in, get an address (a web-ified pointer) to it, and be sure that you can look it up again at any time, from anywhere, using the address key. A generic online storage system with Excel-like properties. If that existed, then people would use it for bookmarks, and probably also for a host of other types of online storage needs.

benlumen 5y ago

I don't know about everyone else, but I usually bookmark to read later. I built a simple bookmarking webapp for this while in university over 10 years ago, pre-Pocket, even. The thing is, I usually don't read it later. Next time you bookmark something to read later, or send it to yourself, or whatever you do - maybe stop and ask: am I actually ever going to open this again? Chances are you're reading articles to procrastinate, and if it's too long or not interesting enough to read even then, bookmarking it is just procrastinating on the procrastination.

15charslong 5y ago

So basically I tried to solve the 'Bookmark Problem' by creating a simple user focused search engine, user builds a list of bookmarks, and the app, Mrkff, allows you to search your bookmarks as if it were google, but tailored to your own content. If you would allow me to plug my own personal bookmarking app - Mrkff [0] - pronounced `Mark off`. I went through YC in 2019 for it, and I launched it in 2020. I also built a cross-platform web-extension for it too using a small framework (Desolate-Zero) I made for the web extensions to make use of all the features of both chrome and firefox. It just a simple click extension and click bookmark and the server takes care of the rest. Basically I opted to make a full-text searchable version of every webpage I bookmark. A copy is also stored on the server, I intended to paywall downloading the actual webpage text, but make it searchable in the free version. This way I can search for obscure words or phrases that were on the webpage that I remembered while not remembering the actual webpage. I had an auto tag system on it too derived from the actual text of the web page. V2 is set to expand from text to video, pdf, audio etc. I had a lot of fun with it, but this version is lacking in certain aspects, and I've spent the last 6 months working on version 2 of this app. I certainly didn't know how widespread this type of app was to be honest. But I use my solution on the daily, so I'll probably continue working on it. [0] - https://mrkff.com https://mrkff.com

csdvrx 5y ago
Have you considered B2B? A lot of small companies would love shared bookmarks to have some employees discover more easily things that were previously bookmarked by other employees.
- 15charslong 5y ago
  Like a shared knowledge base? I hadn't thought about it like this before, but thank you. As I'm writing this all the possibilities are just flooding my mind. I will be looking into this for V2. Thank you so very much.
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    give me your email and let's talk :) I can try to introduce you to first potential clients. This way you'll confirm product market fit. Think simple: even something that could just ingest bookmarks from chrome/edge sqlite database and process them into a custom search engine (that would NOT expose said links to say google, even if they are public links) using good old tf-idf would be extremely valuable.

bradhe 5y ago

Photo organization apps were exactly this back in like 2012.

yoyohello13 5y ago

I feel like an outlier in that I find bookmarks extremely useful. When I start a new project, I create a bookmark folder related to that project. I bookmark any web references I looked at during the course of that project. Then later I can remember "Oh yeah I did something like this in X project." and go peruse those bookmarks. I actually find it pretty fun to go back to old project folders and checkout what kind of stuff I bookmarked in the past.

perrygeo 5y ago

Bookmarks projects fail to be interesting because simply recording a list of links (maybe with folders or tags or some other categorization method) is something anyone can do trivially in a text file. They add no value because they only focus on the easiest part - simply capturing the link. My bookmarks.txt file is just as easy to use and requires only a text editor. I can sync it multiple computers, organize and search it any way I want, back it up, add notes, etc. In many ways a text file is a vast improvement over the existing solutions. If you really want to make a good bookmark app, you need to understand that the act of bookmarking, organizing bookmarks, and using bookmarks are three completely separate activities. When you create a bookmark, you want minimal interaction - click the star, maybe add a tag, and move on. When you're organizing bookmarks you want to review and restructure what you've already bookmarked into folders, a mindmap, etc. while taking into account the content behind each link. When you're using bookmarks, you want to leverage that existing organization scheme to find what you want quickly. Most bookmark features/plugins are decent at the first step of capturing the link, but are terrible at or completely ignore the rest. I would love to see a bookmark app that was designed in the spirit of "Getting Things Done" - where ideas are captured quickly but then funneled into a system where they are later reviewed regularly and acted upon. Just capturing a list of bookmarks and regurgitating them to the user is not sufficient and can be easily replaced with a text file.

bambax 5y ago

> What do you think? I think you've never heard of Pinboard. Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard, it will crush you.

kaashmonee 5y ago

I did expect more than 1 idea though in a post titled "Ideas that have been beaten to death"

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