7 ms·

"But Delicious remains a niche service, with roughly two million monthly active users submitting links." I think this is one more reason to not build consumer

"But Delicious remains a niche service, with roughly two million monthly active users submitting links." I think this is one more reason to not build consumer apps. You can get millions of people to use something, but it still be considered "niche" or "small" and not really make much money.

TillE 12y ago
It's a reason not to make free services. Two million is a huge user base if they're all giving you $10/month. Consumers are willing to pay for value received. I'd certainly pay for a good solution to the mess that is bookmarks, something to complement Pocket. Unfortunately del.icio.us was never quite there.
- cantbecool 12y ago
  you're delusional if someone is going to pay $10 a month for bookmark software. I could see in the realm of a dollar a month, not $10.
  - regoldste 12y ago
    I agree. I might pay up to $5/month if they offered more than just bookmarking. EG, a powerful and comprehensive platform that automatically organizes the material that a user consumes across all devices. It would be especially valuable if it offered a highlighting service like diigo. I'm not sure how many people would pay $60/annually for such a service though.
    - atto 12y ago
      Check out https://www.kifi.com https://www.kifi.com. I'm an engineer there, so am very biased, but it might be what you're looking for. We're building a full text search engine that integrates directly on Google, so you can find important things super easily. We have on-page contextual discussions (launching early next week: sending a link to any email address, and replies to the email thread show up in the discussion). And we're working on recommendation engines based on your keeps / social connections. Let me know what you think, we're a small team and want to make it the most useful platform as possible.
      - regoldste 12y ago
        Thanks for the recommendation, atto, and congratulations on your launch this week! A few thoughts on your site: (1) My first concern is about privacy. The idea that my search results would be curated based on my friends' browsing activity makes me anxious. Does the site link specific search results to individual friends? I expect that kind of public accountability would be inhibiting, making users feel pressured to conduct their searches and browsing much more carefully than they otherwise would, choosing only the most reputable sites and restricting the breadth of their search terms--as if someone was standing behind them scrutinizing every click and search. If Google auto-complete was only populated with search terms conducted in my social network, that would tell me a lot of very personal information about people. Even if you don't link friends to specific searches or sites, I think in many cases it would be easily identifiable, and could have pernicious social effects. Who wants to conduct a search about, say, a personal health matter, if it will fuel gossip among and invite ridicule from their friends? I think I'd end up using the site to search really erudite topics to impress my friends, and leave my personal/dumb searches (i.e., the dumb questions that makes the internet so useful!) to another search engine. (2) Setting aside the privacy concern, I'm not convinced that the product itself--search results curated by my friends' searches--actually offers that much value to me. I like my friends but I don't consider them experts on many topics; and if they are experts on a topic, then (1) I'd probably ask them my question directly rather than searching about it; and/or (2) their internet searching about it is probably at a more technical level than the information I'm searching for. (3) With that being said, I do think the idea behind the product--to curate search results based on the searches of actual experts--is a really good idea. While I wouldn't rely on my friends' opinions on, say, the best cardiologist in the city, or upholstery techniques, or Ukranian politics, I would greatly appreciate having my search results shaped by the opinions of actual experts on those topics. I'd appreciate a search engine that curated search results based on klout scores that accounts for how well-respected those sites are by people on the whole, and by experts in that area. (4) To the extent that the site allows annotation on webpages (eg, highlighting to create a discussion, or adding comments on particular passages or pictures, etc.) I think that is an exceptional, disruptive idea that could really change the way people interact with content. But why limit those comments to just your immediate network? I don't always care what my friends think about a topic they know little about, but I'd care very much to see, e.g., what passages Bill Gates is highlighting in XYZ article about international development. Anyway, those are just my initial perceptions. I'd be happy to chat more via email if you want me to elaborate.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - rokhayakebe 12y ago
    What a bookmark service for your work? Wouldn't companies pay $10/month for 3 users or $20/month for five users to have a repository of links/info + private discussions?
    - edanm 12y ago
      We would and we probably do. (Here's a lesson - business owners will often not even know what services they're signed up to!).
  - johncoltrane 12y ago
    What about a single $10.38 fee? http://pinboard.in/ http://pinboard.in/
  - adrianhoward 12y ago
    Depends what you want it for. I would. I would pay $10 pm for the current pinboard service quite happily - and there are a bunch of things I hate about it! I'd probably pay more for something that wasn't ugly as sin, had good support for team sharing, better historical browsing, etc.
    - balladeer 12y ago
      Paying for a service as a "fan" and paying for it as a consumer are two entirely different things. For example, I like Pinboard but I won't $10 pm for it (I mean the current Pinbaord - especially with the founder's "you want this feature/app? Build it - there's an API"). So the price is just fine. On the other hand for a consumer web-mail service, or something like a DigitalOcean, I would definitely pay an amount like that.
      - adrianhoward 12y ago
        I'm not paying for it as a fan. I'm paying for it because it's a part of my business that I need and use every day. And I'm paying for it despite the fact that it's not a 100% good fit for me. For us - and I know for some other folk I've talked to about exactly this topic - things like delicious and pinboard are really important services. I've done a little bit of custdev around this since a "better pinboard/delicious" for my particular use case is something I'm interested in. I may be atypical. I may not be part of a large enough market for a real business to be built around (only done a little bit of custdev ;-). I've no idea. But I do know there are people willing to pay at least that much on a monthly basis. Coz I've got a smallish mailing list of 'em ;-)
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  Bookmarks are a mess? I was just thinking how crazy it is that people need to outsource bookmark management to a third party.
  - stuaxo 12y ago
    It's useful to be able to bookmark things from various work computers and share it with your computer at home.
    - nl 12y ago
      Both Chrome and Firefox do that. Chrome has a nice feature where you can see what tabs you have open on other computers (assuming you are signed in and have sync enabled). I think Firefox has the same, but I don't use it often enough to have looked for it.
      - twic 12y ago
        Presumably, this doesn't work if you log into different accounts at home and at work.
      - vidarh 12y ago
        And even if you don't want to use the Chrome sync, there's services like Xmarks (which is available for both Chrome and Firefox, and you can also access your bookmarks via a website, and make all or part of them accessible via RSS)
      - netghost 12y ago
        I'll point out the obvious, which is that now your bookmarks are all tied to that browser. Not a huge deal if you don't want to switch browsers any time soon, but it can be nice to sit down at another person's computer and pull things up.
        toomuchtodo 12y ago
        I believe your Chrome bookmarks can be exposed via your Google Drive account.
- christiansmith 12y ago
  > I'd certainly pay for a good solution to the mess that is bookmarks http://pinboard.in http://pinboard.in has very nicely solved the problem for me, with tagging and search. Well worth the $10 one-time fee.
  - hnomsoc 12y ago
    I use putmi these days. it's probably the easiest and powerful bookmarking tool in mobile safari. I simply love it's UI and cross browser access
- pcwalton 12y ago
  > It's a reason not to make free services. Two million is a huge user base if they're all giving you $10/month. > Consumers are willing to pay for value received. Well, app.net is a cautionary tale in the other direction. It really depends on the business.
  - culturestate 12y ago
    Arguably, app.net provides only marginal value in its current state. It never developed into the "global authentication" platform that it really promised to be, and who's going to pay for a less-popular Twitter? If app.net provided the same level of utility that delicious does, I doubt very much that they would be in the same financial straits that they are now.
  - balladeer 12y ago
    App.net didn't offer anything that wasn't already there (for all practical purposes), for "free". Worse still, they claimed they will offer that "something different" but didn't.
hagbardgroup 12y ago
Isn't this a reason to make it easier for people to use bitcoin to pay subscriptions? Transaction fees and chargebacks make a $0.50/month fee impossible, but using some sort of cryptocurrency, that could be a solid alternative to the VC + free model.
- FigBug 12y ago
  Bitcoin transaction fees are around $0.40 to get your transaction accepted. While you could pay with no fee, it could take days for the transaction to be accepted. Maybe one of the altcoins would work better. But now you are limiting your customer base to people who have altcoins, which must be a pretty small market.
  - hagbardgroup 12y ago
    You could extend them a subscription on credit, just like businesses do before credit/debit transactions settle. Ripple then? Again that rests on adoption for Ripple, which is probably even smaller than a lot of alt coins.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    $0.40? As in 40 US dollar-cents? As far as I know, it's much lower than that, around $0.005 (probably lower now, Bitcoin has dropped since then) https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305 "The new fee after this patch is 0.5 cents."
    - FigBug 12y ago
      http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction I'm guessing y-axis is cents. Looks like it's about $0.25 - $0.30 these days.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        No, that's mining costs, not transaction fees. And it's in dollars, not cents.

TillE 12y ago

It's a reason not to make free services. Two million is a huge user base if they're all giving you $10/month. Consumers are willing to pay for value received. I'd certainly pay for a good solution to the mess that is bookmarks, something to complement Pocket. Unfortunately del.icio.us was never quite there.

cantbecool 12y ago
you're delusional if someone is going to pay $10 a month for bookmark software. I could see in the realm of a dollar a month, not $10.
- regoldste 12y ago
  I agree. I might pay up to $5/month if they offered more than just bookmarking. EG, a powerful and comprehensive platform that automatically organizes the material that a user consumes across all devices. It would be especially valuable if it offered a highlighting service like diigo. I'm not sure how many people would pay $60/annually for such a service though.
  - atto 12y ago
    Check out https://www.kifi.com https://www.kifi.com. I'm an engineer there, so am very biased, but it might be what you're looking for. We're building a full text search engine that integrates directly on Google, so you can find important things super easily. We have on-page contextual discussions (launching early next week: sending a link to any email address, and replies to the email thread show up in the discussion). And we're working on recommendation engines based on your keeps / social connections. Let me know what you think, we're a small team and want to make it the most useful platform as possible.
    - regoldste 12y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation, atto, and congratulations on your launch this week! A few thoughts on your site: (1) My first concern is about privacy. The idea that my search results would be curated based on my friends' browsing activity makes me anxious. Does the site link specific search results to individual friends? I expect that kind of public accountability would be inhibiting, making users feel pressured to conduct their searches and browsing much more carefully than they otherwise would, choosing only the most reputable sites and restricting the breadth of their search terms--as if someone was standing behind them scrutinizing every click and search. If Google auto-complete was only populated with search terms conducted in my social network, that would tell me a lot of very personal information about people. Even if you don't link friends to specific searches or sites, I think in many cases it would be easily identifiable, and could have pernicious social effects. Who wants to conduct a search about, say, a personal health matter, if it will fuel gossip among and invite ridicule from their friends? I think I'd end up using the site to search really erudite topics to impress my friends, and leave my personal/dumb searches (i.e., the dumb questions that makes the internet so useful!) to another search engine. (2) Setting aside the privacy concern, I'm not convinced that the product itself--search results curated by my friends' searches--actually offers that much value to me. I like my friends but I don't consider them experts on many topics; and if they are experts on a topic, then (1) I'd probably ask them my question directly rather than searching about it; and/or (2) their internet searching about it is probably at a more technical level than the information I'm searching for. (3) With that being said, I do think the idea behind the product--to curate search results based on the searches of actual experts--is a really good idea. While I wouldn't rely on my friends' opinions on, say, the best cardiologist in the city, or upholstery techniques, or Ukranian politics, I would greatly appreciate having my search results shaped by the opinions of actual experts on those topics. I'd appreciate a search engine that curated search results based on klout scores that accounts for how well-respected those sites are by people on the whole, and by experts in that area. (4) To the extent that the site allows annotation on webpages (eg, highlighting to create a discussion, or adding comments on particular passages or pictures, etc.) I think that is an exceptional, disruptive idea that could really change the way people interact with content. But why limit those comments to just your immediate network? I don't always care what my friends think about a topic they know little about, but I'd care very much to see, e.g., what passages Bill Gates is highlighting in XYZ article about international development. Anyway, those are just my initial perceptions. I'd be happy to chat more via email if you want me to elaborate.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- rokhayakebe 12y ago
  What a bookmark service for your work? Wouldn't companies pay $10/month for 3 users or $20/month for five users to have a repository of links/info + private discussions?
  - edanm 12y ago
    We would and we probably do. (Here's a lesson - business owners will often not even know what services they're signed up to!).
- johncoltrane 12y ago
  What about a single $10.38 fee? http://pinboard.in/ http://pinboard.in/
- adrianhoward 12y ago
  Depends what you want it for. I would. I would pay $10 pm for the current pinboard service quite happily - and there are a bunch of things I hate about it! I'd probably pay more for something that wasn't ugly as sin, had good support for team sharing, better historical browsing, etc.
  - balladeer 12y ago
    Paying for a service as a "fan" and paying for it as a consumer are two entirely different things. For example, I like Pinboard but I won't $10 pm for it (I mean the current Pinbaord - especially with the founder's "you want this feature/app? Build it - there's an API"). So the price is just fine. On the other hand for a consumer web-mail service, or something like a DigitalOcean, I would definitely pay an amount like that.
    - adrianhoward 12y ago
      I'm not paying for it as a fan. I'm paying for it because it's a part of my business that I need and use every day. And I'm paying for it despite the fact that it's not a 100% good fit for me. For us - and I know for some other folk I've talked to about exactly this topic - things like delicious and pinboard are really important services. I've done a little bit of custdev around this since a "better pinboard/delicious" for my particular use case is something I'm interested in. I may be atypical. I may not be part of a large enough market for a real business to be built around (only done a little bit of custdev ;-). I've no idea. But I do know there are people willing to pay at least that much on a monthly basis. Coz I've got a smallish mailing list of 'em ;-)
jsmeaton 12y ago
Bookmarks are a mess? I was just thinking how crazy it is that people need to outsource bookmark management to a third party.
- stuaxo 12y ago
  It's useful to be able to bookmark things from various work computers and share it with your computer at home.
  - nl 12y ago
    Both Chrome and Firefox do that. Chrome has a nice feature where you can see what tabs you have open on other computers (assuming you are signed in and have sync enabled). I think Firefox has the same, but I don't use it often enough to have looked for it.
    - twic 12y ago
      Presumably, this doesn't work if you log into different accounts at home and at work.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      And even if you don't want to use the Chrome sync, there's services like Xmarks (which is available for both Chrome and Firefox, and you can also access your bookmarks via a website, and make all or part of them accessible via RSS)
    - netghost 12y ago
      I'll point out the obvious, which is that now your bookmarks are all tied to that browser. Not a huge deal if you don't want to switch browsers any time soon, but it can be nice to sit down at another person's computer and pull things up.
      - toomuchtodo 12y ago
        I believe your Chrome bookmarks can be exposed via your Google Drive account.
christiansmith 12y ago
> I'd certainly pay for a good solution to the mess that is bookmarks http://pinboard.in http://pinboard.in has very nicely solved the problem for me, with tagging and search. Well worth the $10 one-time fee.
- hnomsoc 12y ago
  I use putmi these days. it's probably the easiest and powerful bookmarking tool in mobile safari. I simply love it's UI and cross browser access
pcwalton 12y ago
> It's a reason not to make free services. Two million is a huge user base if they're all giving you $10/month. > Consumers are willing to pay for value received. Well, app.net is a cautionary tale in the other direction. It really depends on the business.
- culturestate 12y ago
  Arguably, app.net provides only marginal value in its current state. It never developed into the "global authentication" platform that it really promised to be, and who's going to pay for a less-popular Twitter? If app.net provided the same level of utility that delicious does, I doubt very much that they would be in the same financial straits that they are now.
- balladeer 12y ago
  App.net didn't offer anything that wasn't already there (for all practical purposes), for "free". Worse still, they claimed they will offer that "something different" but didn't.

hagbardgroup 12y ago

Isn't this a reason to make it easier for people to use bitcoin to pay subscriptions? Transaction fees and chargebacks make a $0.50/month fee impossible, but using some sort of cryptocurrency, that could be a solid alternative to the VC + free model.

FigBug 12y ago
Bitcoin transaction fees are around $0.40 to get your transaction accepted. While you could pay with no fee, it could take days for the transaction to be accepted. Maybe one of the altcoins would work better. But now you are limiting your customer base to people who have altcoins, which must be a pretty small market.
- hagbardgroup 12y ago
  You could extend them a subscription on credit, just like businesses do before credit/debit transactions settle. Ripple then? Again that rests on adoption for Ripple, which is probably even smaller than a lot of alt coins.
- icebraining 12y ago
  $0.40? As in 40 US dollar-cents? As far as I know, it's much lower than that, around $0.005 (probably lower now, Bitcoin has dropped since then) https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305 https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305 "The new fee after this patch is 0.5 cents."
  - FigBug 12y ago
    http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction I'm guessing y-axis is cents. Looks like it's about $0.25 - $0.30 these days.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      No, that's mining costs, not transaction fees. And it's in dollars, not cents.