5 ms·

Pinboard Turns Three

122 points by urbanjunkie 14y ago

franze 14y ago
congrats! the best investment of (in my case) 9.13$ ever!
soapdog 14y ago
I really enjoy using it! Congrats and thanks for the good work
taylorbuley 14y ago
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
il 14y ago
It's interesting to contrast this post with all the posts about multi million dollar funding rounds currently on the front page.
- incongruity 14y ago
  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.
gilrain 14y ago
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.
- gilrain 14y ago
  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.
antidoh 14y ago
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.
treelovinhippie 14y ago
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.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  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.
  - treelovinhippie 14y ago
    Delicious and Pinterest don't let you see your old bookmarks?
    - sthatipamala 14y ago
      Archiving as in the service also stores the content of the bookmarks, in case the original site goes down.
  - froo 14y ago
    Where can you find bookmarking with archiving for free? (don't say archive.org) I personally use evernote. Works well enough
ZanderEarth32 14y ago
I finally singed up yesterday. Couldn't be happier with it.
TorBoT 14y ago
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?
- thelibrarian 14y ago
  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.
mutagen 14y ago
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.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  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.htm 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).
  - nico_h 14y ago
    Hi 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 https://github.com/nicolasH/frankensteins
wyclif 14y ago
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.
shrikant 14y ago
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 http://shrik.theswamp.in/2012/07/youre-doing-it-right.html [2] http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/06/do_it_yourself_bookmarking/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/06/do_it_yourself_bookmarking/
goblin89 14y ago
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.
- citricsquid 14y ago
  I recommend historious (http://historio.us/ http://historio.us/).
  - goblin89 14y ago
    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.)
huskyr 14y ago
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.
- joering2 14y ago
  I second that. Hopefuly Maciej will put some work in place soon.
- beala 14y ago
  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 http://pastebin.com/mwSYY8mu
- zachbeane 14y ago
  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.
tuananh 14y ago
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

122 points by urbanjunkie 14y ago

franze 14y ago

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

soapdog 14y ago

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

taylorbuley 14y ago

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

il 14y ago

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

incongruity 14y ago
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.

gilrain 14y ago

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.

gilrain 14y ago
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.

antidoh 14y ago

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.

treelovinhippie 14y ago

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.

ricardobeat 14y ago
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.
- treelovinhippie 14y ago
  Delicious and Pinterest don't let you see your old bookmarks?
  - sthatipamala 14y ago
    Archiving as in the service also stores the content of the bookmarks, in case the original site goes down.
- froo 14y ago
  Where can you find bookmarking with archiving for free? (don't say archive.org) I personally use evernote. Works well enough

ZanderEarth32 14y ago

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

TorBoT 14y ago

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?

thelibrarian 14y ago
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.

mutagen 14y ago

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.

keithpeter 14y ago
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.htm 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).
- nico_h 14y ago
  Hi 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 https://github.com/nicolasH/frankensteins

wyclif 14y ago

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.

shrikant 14y ago

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 http://shrik.theswamp.in/2012/07/youre-doing-it-right.html [2] http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/06/do_it_yourself_bookmarking/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/06/do_it_yourself_bookmarking/

goblin89 14y ago

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.

citricsquid 14y ago
I recommend historious (http://historio.us/ http://historio.us/).
- goblin89 14y ago
  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.)

huskyr 14y ago

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.

joering2 14y ago
I second that. Hopefuly Maciej will put some work in place soon.
beala 14y ago
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 http://pastebin.com/mwSYY8mu
zachbeane 14y ago
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.

tuananh 14y ago

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