Or like don't ruin a perfectly good site trying to chase Digg or whatever the hell Yahoo was chasing.'
If Yahoo had taken del.icio.us circa 2005 and never changed a thing, Pinboard doesn't even exist. They destroyed their own userbase trying to chase markets.
I wonder how much he paid for it. Last I heard he was making something like 250k per year. I would expect delicious to go for a few million at least. Did he buy it for a song, or did he get investors or funding?
I'm happy to be one of them. I honestly barely use it, but I had a ton of bookmarks at Delicious that I was uncomfortable about losing. $11/yr means they stick around, plus I do still stuff links in there every now and then.
I'd be interested in that too. But I don't think it's a big money. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't $1 since otherwise you have still-active users calling your support and consuming your time and money.
I followed the saga, or rather the bits of it Maciej mentioned here and there, and I bet the price was not high. Basically the owner was bleeding money with shocking AWS charges, and was looking for a way out himself. I expect one of the reasons that it's going read-only so quickly is to turn off the saving/replicating machinery and cut bills. Once he does that, he can probably turn on export features again.
I wonder what is so wrong in delicious' backend that is so expensive to run. Maybe that's why Yahoo ditched it, for some reason it's a money pit...? Note how Maciej is explicitly saying he will never turn it back on, not even redirecting the api endpoints which should be trivial. There must be a reason for that.
I'll do a technical post about all this soon. The current Delicious hosting bill is around $2500/month, which is twice what Pinboard costs to run. Part of the problem is that the site is spread across a bunch of small servers, as a legacy of its days on AWS.
The blog post states the opposite, that export will be restored (the previous owner had turned it off). It also implies that the export will continue to be available for some time (the stuff about no time pressure).
$100,000 USD, but with a covenant in place to keep it running in read-only mode forever. $300,000 USD without the covenant.
(Assumes new owner takes over the $30,000/year hosting bill the moment the transaction completes. See Maciej's comment somewhere in the great-grandparent's thread with that number - $2500/month hosting).
> I just spoke to Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski. In a statement, he said “I am the greatest.” Ceglowski also confirmed the purchase price for del.icio.us, which was $35,000.
This is gold and yes sir you are pretty damn great! Good job.
By the time pinboard was popular delicious was effectively dead. It was delicious that changed, Pinboard basically just took the interface and features it abandoned. They never really competed directly like Reddit and Digg.
> They never really competed directly like Reddit and Digg.
Even so that wasn't my core point here. The analogies between
the two are still plentiful.
Digg didn't die because of Reddit's 'competition' either. Digg shot themselves in the foot while Reddit largely did nothing and won because of it.
Both Digg/Delicious made big mistakes by doing their social network era redesigns, while Pinboard and Reddit were built around simple designs and staying true to a core concept. That's the point.
This is an unfair and incorrect assessment. It's all situational and contextual. Reddit was pretty much seen as a copycat failure that sold to a large corp because they couldn't figure themselves out. It was only after Digg messed up on their own they enjoyed their run.
Pinboard is great, but it never competed against Delicious. In fact it came out long timer after people stopped using Delicious.
I remember the announcement and the huge exodus from delicious to pinboard. That's when I heard of pinboard first. The import feature was under heavy load and from what I remember it took a week(or couple of days? ) to import your bookmarks from delicious or was it from an exported file...
> Pinboard is great, but it never competed against Delicious.
I used both products from the early days of each and this is entirely false. Whether or not Delicious continued down the social bookmarking path in it's original incarnation doesn't mean they weren't competing.
I only completely switched from Delicious after their awful 'redesign' and still having an outstanding need for a cloud-based bookmarking service when Pinboard came around. Same with Digg/Reddit. I used both but ditched Digg when they did the misguided v3 relaunch, like everyone else.
as an early reddit user, i saw it as "slashdot, but with a better comment engine". digg had more of the feel of a generic news aggregator, not really focused on the slashdot crowd at all; i checked it out briefly but was never really engaged by it.
... but worse moderation. While rose-tinted glasses may be involved and /. never was Metafilter, if I had to design a community policing system today, Slashdot would be where I would start. Hot grids and all.
In the early days, Delicious and Reddit were often talked about as being in the "social bookmarking" space since they both centered around sharing links with other people. Remember Reddit didn't even have comments for a long time! The distinction was in Delicious you tagged links, in Reddit you voted on links. I visited both regularly to get my social link fix.
I'm sure from your POV Reddit has always been an entirely different beast, but (and at the risk of teaching my grandmother how to suck eggs) as an early user of both I saw them as have a lot of similarity, both forging a similar and exciting new future of people collectively making the web more discoverable.
I actually tried to build a product which attempted to combine the best of both: a tool for communities to organize links. I still think there is room for something like that, but countless people have tried and none have taken off, so it seem it is way harder to get something like that to catch on than it seemed in those heady days of web 2.0.
You misremember. Digg said it was "social bookmarking" for a while which caused me no end of headache, but Reddit never did and I don't remember anyone ever talking about them in that context.
Neither Reddit nor Digg offered actual bookmarking, so if you thought they were similar to Delicious you didn't really understand the product.
I'm torn. On one hand, a couple years ago when delicious went down for over a week, I paid for an account at pinboard and haven't regretted it one bit. On the other hand, it is sad to see such an old brand mismanaged and unable to survive on its own. I have hope that it is in good hands though.
I was sad when Yahoo bought delicious 'cause I knew it was over. But Delicious was the first of its kind, and provided really good discovery. I dont understand why pinboard bought it. To preserve the bookmarks?
Sadly that ship partly sailed when Yahoo dumped it; a huge proportion of the accounts never got exported including ones who explicitly consented to the transfer.
I don't know anybody who stayed with it after that
Probably for the same reason that the Internet Archive decided to thoroughly archive all of GeoCities when that closed. People tend to like preserving what they view as being important history.
Also, not wanting a billion bookmarks to vanish is a good reason. Plus I'm sure he can convert a bunch of former Delicious users over to Pinboard simply by operating the service.
I honestly didn't realize delicious was still around. It felt really groundbreaking at the time. I loved the ability to tag and search for links by tags to find new interesting content. Perhaps with introduction news mashups like digg it didn't feel as useful anymore. I stopped using delicious soon after it was acquired by yahoo.
"The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.[2][3][4] Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011,[5] and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year.[6] In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc.[7] In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service.[8]"
I almost can't believe this isn't one of Maciej's snarky satirical posts, if only because there's no way he would do this with stock or debt and so it must be an all-cash transaction, and I didn't realize that he was either pulling in that much or Delicious was that desperate.
I signed up for an archival Pinboard account last weekend though, so maybe it was my $25 that put it over the top ;)
If the $35K figure is correct, many of us could write a check for that today (at least those of us whose entire six-figure salary isn't consumed by a SV mortgage). Even six figures would doable for the more frugal amongst us (though frugal I am personally not).
I've used Delicious for 12 years, with 10,000+ bookmarks in it. Delicious went up and down and was sold, I got nervous and got a Pinboard account as a backup, back when it was doing one-time charges, but inertia kept me in Delicious. The recent downtimes, plus the iOS app no longer working, and Pinboard extensions making saving links easy, pushed me over last month. I was frustrated that the Delicious export went away, so the Pinboard acquisition is going to be perfect for me.
https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...
"If you’re a Delicious user, you will have to find another place to save your bookmarks. The site will stay online. but on June 15, I will put Delicious into read-only mode. You won't be able to save new bookmarks after that date, or use the API."
https://del.icio.us/export
"We're sorry, but due to heavy load on our database we are no longer able to offer an export function. Our engineers are working on this and we will restore it as soon as possible."
Those who prefer to bookmark elsewhere will be able to export their data once I fix the export link, which was disabled some months ago for peformance reasons.
That's probably some cruft from the previous owners. Considering Maciej's vocal commitment to an open web, I'm sure he'll be implementing a functional export and direct port-to-pinboard soon. This announcement does seem oddly slapdash, though....why not wait a few weeks to announce once this stuff is in place?
"Those who prefer to bookmark elsewhere will be able to export their data once I fix the export link, which was disabled some months ago for peformance reasons.
Please note that there is no time pressure for moving off Delicious."
I am still waiting for a better experience in save what I like.
Pocket is great for text, but only for that. Pinboard is cool and safe but is not for me. I still use google to find things that I have saved before, since 96, I have countless files called Temp on bookmarkers for things that I need organize, things saved on twitter, Medium, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Keep, HN, Evernote and on mobile, there are tons of screenshots of things that I could use later. And that is for things that I already have seen, but, unfortunately, nothing of this is used to refine my experience in discovery new things that I could, potentially, like to see.
I really hope that more people attempt to compete with Pinboard.
I used Pinboard a couple of years ago but stopped using it in favor of Pocket (I can't seem to recollect the exact reason why). Pocket is great for things that I want to save for later. I have cached copies of webpages in my Pocket that are no longer online, so that is pretty neat.
Lately I've noticed that Pocket has become like a cold storage for me. I rarely ever go back to reading the bookmarks from it. I recently found a bookmarklet [1] on PH that works like Pocket but sends the bookmarks to your email instead of sending it another app. It has been working pretty well for me so far. I've been using it to send myself an email for stuff that I want to read in the near future (within the next couple of days or so) and use Pocket for saving links that I might need at some later date.
But discoverability is still an issue, I am yet to find a decent solution that can help me find new things based on my interests.
I've discovered that the missing link for me was getting the articles onto my Kindle. I now read between 100-150 articles a month this way, previously I would read only 10-30 articles in a month.
I use Wallabag, an open source alternative to Pocket. It generates an RSS feed which Calibre can read, download, and send to the e-reader. Pocket should do the same thing. Once a week or so I go through and mark articles as read, then open up Calibre to re-download the fresh feed.
One weird trick (heh) that has become really useful is reversing the RSS feed. So I receive two 'e-books' on my Kindle, one with new articles and one with old articles. This satisfies me, since I'm often wanting to read some new articles ASAP, while also working my way through the backlog.
Calibre lets you script the feed processing in Python. With Wallabag the feed is also paginated, so you could accomplish nearly the same thing by selecting a higher page number. Not sure if Pocket does that.
Came here to also suggest wallabag. Getting running on your own host is dead simple (just a few 'apt-get's and a 'make' script) and the community has made
apps for just about every platform. Also, as a limited-vision reader, the accessibility options are really well done!
I was looking for a pocket replacement due to privacy concerns and an ever growing annoyance with ads. Wallabag has a Pocket importer and the rss feeds are a really nice touch! I even put up a parser on my website to show people my starred articles: http://desandoval.net/i-am
I'll try the ebook trick. That is a really good idea! I was looking for a reason to pull out my old B&N Nook again ;)
The experience I had using pinboard was very similar to what I have using Chrome and Firefox Bookmakers. As I said, I still have saved pages I used in 1996, I have never had an experience of losing everything. So, the only advantage would be the rankings and the tags trends.
Well, and being able to get at your bookmarks from anywhere, and being able to attach searchable descriptions/tags to the bookmarks so you can find it even if the page title or URL isn't memorable.
Firefox bookmarks support tags, keywords and descriptions. Plus it syncs (encrypted end-to-end), so you can get them anywhere if you can use Firefox from that place.
I use both browser bookmarks (Firefox) and Pinboard. I think they're complementary rather than one being a replacement for the other.
I use browser bookmarks for pages I visit often or intend to return to fairly soon. I use Pinboard for long-term archival where link rot is a real concern.
I'm one of the earliest users of Delicious who recently built a modern bookmarking platform. It's called Kozmos (https://getkozmos.com). It's a competitor to Pinboard, and its difference is simplifying bookmarking into one heart button, I mean you don't need to fill forms to bookmark a page anymore. It has an advanced search engine that makes you find whatever you're looking for.
Hey Azer! Was wondering what you've been up to, I couldn't remember what your name was, always be #leftpadgate guy to me. Gonna check out your service.
Looks cool. And I was thinking about how a better experience to bookmark could reshape how I use the browser now. Funny how coincidently you went from building a better browser to build a bookmarker. Btw, I used to use Too-Many-Tabs to change from House to Work mode. Now I have 2 logins on Chrome, is there anything like this on kozmos?
The business model relies on the next versions which will introduce new innovative ideas on top of bookmarking. It'll take some time, I won't rush. Currently the server is AWS free tier so it's not costing me anything. Personally I'm doing contractor to keep my budget healthy.
Personally, I absolutely need the option to tag bookmarks, is this supported, or do you have plans to?
I imagine pinboard supports this, but when I looked at it something stopped me from pulling the trigger, despite how desperate I am for this type of service.
Kozmos will support collections soon. So users will be able to organize and publish their links.
For tagging, it has a different approach. It has tags behind the scenes; reads the tags from the bookmarked page, and adds also additional tags such as the type of content.
There are some neat features described, but I don't see them to have much to do with the filesystem accessibility. I can see the advantages of using a standard interface for many kinds of sites, like social media, but the filesystem format is neither necessary nor sufficient for that (since it says nothing about the format of the actual files).
A filesystem is an abstraction to an information store which removes the underlying implementation details of accessing that store.
A filesystem is a CRUD (or BREAD) tool, based on standard metadata and interfaces. Part of that is making available extra and user-useful capabilities.
Another part of the problem is that the current concept of a browser, which lacks the idea of downloading-and-storing, on an accessible and persistent basis, online content, and emphasises application and interactive functions over document and reference capabilities, is ... something of a historical accident.
Why make use of some remote pinboarding or bookmarking feature if you've got a common URL referencing system, and the ability to capture, transform, rate/rank, search, and organise into a workflow, project, or support context the information you're accessing via the Web.
And to do that by way of tools which treat this as information-on-disk, either known and extant utilities, or extensions / wrappers / enhancements of these. Most specifically, by unwrapping online content from the browser context specifically.
This goes deep into principles of application, information, and interface design and use. I'm calling the extant model a dead duck.
I agree with your diagnosis of browsers and with the idea of using local tools that interact using standard CRUD interfaces, I just don't see the filesystem part buying you anything over HTTP, which provides all that. I think it's a useless distraction at best, and a fatal flaw at worst.
I also disagree that the app-ification was an historical accident; I think it's the direct result of economical forces, and I'm not convinced that an alternative system could become popular while avoiding it.
Economics forces shape historic accidents too. That's very much part of my model.
You might want to look through the inspirations part of the doc to see what's prompted this. I've also turned up a number of similar projects after having started writing that essay.
But:
* The /proc and /sys filesystems on Linux
* The /net virtual filesystem on many Solaris systems, generally tying to an NFS network via automount.
* Various Plan 9 elements, including /webfs
* The Midnight Commander virtual filesystems, including remote access over ssh.
* SSHFS.
* Tools for on-demand and responsive media response. Tracking an element down to its source, and requesting, say, PDF or ePub rather than HTML might automatically provide those. The idea of being able to run, say, 'ls' on an HTML target and have it return a list of links rather than its full content.
* Unix mail, mailx, mutt, and especially mh, which provides a shell-based perspective to email management.
* Numerous document markup and preparation systems.
* Squid, dansguardian, Tor, and other Web proxy tools.
* Libraries and catalogs, generally.
* The Internet Archive.
* HTML doc "reader-mode" tools: Readability, Pocket, Instapaper, Outline.
* Search
Again: wiring much of this into the FS layer, abstracting away the browser, treating doc requests as queues, splitting up docs, media, apps, and commerce, integrating into the user's workflow rather than the publishers.
If it's not for you, that's fine. But that's where I'm coming from.
First I used browser bookmarks. Organizing and searching them was a mess. And link rot was terrible.
I looked for something different and used OneNote to store complete web-pages in the cloud. Link rot was gone and organizing and searching was awesome. Until my OneNote file on OneDrive reached 8GB and performance and syncing took a nosedive.
And not so long ago I found ScrapBook for Firefox [1]. Couldn't be happier! Storing everything locally is awesome. Searching and organizing full pages and links is great. I can take care of backing up the data myself and can crawl the pages on my local drive.
I just hope that firefox keeps those plugins running, otherwise I'll have to find something else again...
Thanks for your input. But there are a few important things which I really like about ScrapBook:
It's simple to organize. A sidebar with folders, supporting drag and drop.
It stores the source 'as is' with html, css, images and optionally js. This simplifies tooling and scraping locally. Afaik, MHT is not yet fully supported on all browsers.
I can go offline and look at stored pages. This is very important for me because I have a long commute by train each day.
Since OneNote I avoid cloud storage and syncing when possible. After GB's of Data, syncing starts to be a nightmare. But, I could start syncing with dropbox, rsync or something else. And I'm free to choose. Fortunately I don't need collaboration features.
In my opinion a simple, local solution beats everything else. Actually, a feature like this should be built into the browser natively. And it's not far off from the current state: It is simply a bookmark sidebar which also supports save-page. It's kinda sad that, after so many years, browser still make it hard to store and watch content offline. The current save-page functions just don't cut it.
Try Are.na (https://www.are.na). Built for saving all types of content, more centered around organizing information than straight-up social bookmarking (though people use it to do that). Disclaimer: one of the co-founders.
It's not really what you're after, but we're some folks trying to compete with Pinboard. I'm sure Maciej once tweeted something about it being a business that could be successful for a couple of indie devs, not a big VC-backed startup, and that's what we are... Although the successful part is still a ways off :)
Anyway, our thing is https://larder.io. Our angle is that we'll sync your github starred repos as bookmarks along with everything else you save.
The most important reason I continue to use Pinboard is that it's the only service I'm confident won't be acquired and shut down within a week with no warning or no data export. (based on Maciej and his talks, blog posts, etc.)
The rest of the services mentioned in this thread? Who knows?
With all due respect to the owner and the author of this blog post. As an old delicious user, an individual, who gave up on delicious long time ago. And as a non-pinboard user who never cared for it. The only response came to mind, reading this extremely prideful blog post, is: FU.
Edit:
Down-voters, you're welcome!
If you're young enough and do not go back in time on the Internet; you have no idea what it was like pre-pinboard days. If you're old enough and did not think having a paid service provides all the solutions to the Internet's underlying problem; you know what I mean above.
I think it is, I once saw a talk of him in front of the Congress Library (or something like this). He was humble and focused, and I love his product. Already saved >800 Bookmarks with Pinboard.
Back when del.icio.us got sold to Yahoo, I couldn't stand some of the changes they made (e.g. infinite scroll) and I wrote my own minimalist clone (http://www.savecrate.com)
It's basically remained unchanged since, with the exception of removing site previews a bit back for optimization purposes.
Always meant to rewrite & open source it, maybe now's the time...
237 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadIf Yahoo had taken del.icio.us circa 2005 and never changed a thing, Pinboard doesn't even exist. They destroyed their own userbase trying to chase markets.
[0]https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/
[1]: https://pinboard.in/tour/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14438221
(something like 2000 out of millions of accounts would pay that off in a year or 2)
I wonder what is so wrong in delicious' backend that is so expensive to run. Maybe that's why Yahoo ditched it, for some reason it's a money pit...? Note how Maciej is explicitly saying he will never turn it back on, not even redirecting the api endpoints which should be trivial. There must be a reason for that.
(Assumes new owner takes over the $30,000/year hosting bill the moment the transaction completes. See Maciej's comment somewhere in the great-grandparent's thread with that number - $2500/month hosting).
Well, I'm way off. Purchase price was $35,000 USD - https://thenextweb.com/apps/2017/06/01/its-the-end-of-an-era...
This is gold and yes sir you are pretty damn great! Good job.
Delicious vs Pinboard was basically Digg vs Reddit.
The one who focused on the basic core usecase over flashy features and modern/trendy design won.
Even so that wasn't my core point here. The analogies between the two are still plentiful.
Digg didn't die because of Reddit's 'competition' either. Digg shot themselves in the foot while Reddit largely did nothing and won because of it.
Both Digg/Delicious made big mistakes by doing their social network era redesigns, while Pinboard and Reddit were built around simple designs and staying true to a core concept. That's the point.
Pinboard is great, but it never competed against Delicious. In fact it came out long timer after people stopped using Delicious.
It got a HUGE boost when the announcement of Delicious' sunsetting came out.
https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/03/anatomy_of_a_crushing/
My favourite line comes from the tweet storm (http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/the-small-exodus-from-...):
> "there are worse things than being DDOS'ed by people trying to give you money"
I used both products from the early days of each and this is entirely false. Whether or not Delicious continued down the social bookmarking path in it's original incarnation doesn't mean they weren't competing.
I only completely switched from Delicious after their awful 'redesign' and still having an outstanding need for a cloud-based bookmarking service when Pinboard came around. Same with Digg/Reddit. I used both but ditched Digg when they did the misguided v3 relaunch, like everyone else.
[by whom ?] as they say over in en.wikipedia ...
Don't know the numbers, but Reddit always sported a more "in" crowd, who looked down on the Digg unwashed.
Wouldn't call Delicious flashy or modern. The design is almost as brutalist as Pinboard. I don't like either.
The original Delicious interface was simple and easy to use. Not quite as minimalist as Pinboard, but nowhere near the crap they released later.
I'm sure from your POV Reddit has always been an entirely different beast, but (and at the risk of teaching my grandmother how to suck eggs) as an early user of both I saw them as have a lot of similarity, both forging a similar and exciting new future of people collectively making the web more discoverable.
I actually tried to build a product which attempted to combine the best of both: a tool for communities to organize links. I still think there is room for something like that, but countless people have tried and none have taken off, so it seem it is way harder to get something like that to catch on than it seemed in those heady days of web 2.0.
Neither Reddit nor Digg offered actual bookmarking, so if you thought they were similar to Delicious you didn't really understand the product.
I don't know anybody who stayed with it after that
> Delicious has over a billion bookmarks and is a fascinating piece of web history. […] I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.
Also, not wanting a billion bookmarks to vanish is a good reason. Plus I'm sure he can convert a bunch of former Delicious users over to Pinboard simply by operating the service.
> Users will have an opportunity to migrate their bookmarks to a Pinboard account, which costs $11/year.
It's also possible maciej wants to ~~do Machine Learning on the data~~, as they have "over a billion bookmarks", but that seems unlikely to me.
I'd bet the "real reason" truly was sentimental:
> Delicious ... is a fascinating piece of web history. ... I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.
Excuse me? "Unlikely"? Understatement of the thread.
And I wouldn't describe that sentence as a sentimental motivation, but rather an _archival_ motivation. Preserve your history or it will be lost.
Site has been bounced around a bit since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
"The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.[2][3][4] Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011,[5] and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year.[6] In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc.[7] In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service.[8]"
I signed up for an archival Pinboard account last weekend though, so maybe it was my $25 that put it over the top ;)
https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/
Hosting costs, OTOH...
Next Story: Tarsnap promptly migrates Dropbox to FreeBSD
Two thumbs up.
Keep doing what you were doing, Pinboard, do not ever buy into the argument that changed Delicious from what it was.
It's $20 million!
I've used it for 7.5 years with 22k+ bookmarks.
I stopped using it last year because of the downtimes as well.
> I was frustrated that the Delicious export went away
Too much load on their servers.
Instead of transferring, I simply made a simple bookmarker with similar functionality (allows importing) that I could self-host.
See https://github.com/dyu/bookmarks/ if interested.
Edited: export comment
Fixing it seems to be on pinboard priority : https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/870334621648654336 nice !
Those who prefer to bookmark elsewhere will be able to export their data once I fix the export link, which was disabled some months ago for peformance reasons.
"Those who prefer to bookmark elsewhere will be able to export their data once I fix the export link, which was disabled some months ago for peformance reasons.
Please note that there is no time pressure for moving off Delicious."
Ah, and I don't give a damn about Pinboard or Google Bookmarks either.
I only use Pocket.
Pocket is great for text, but only for that. Pinboard is cool and safe but is not for me. I still use google to find things that I have saved before, since 96, I have countless files called Temp on bookmarkers for things that I need organize, things saved on twitter, Medium, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Keep, HN, Evernote and on mobile, there are tons of screenshots of things that I could use later. And that is for things that I already have seen, but, unfortunately, nothing of this is used to refine my experience in discovery new things that I could, potentially, like to see.
I really hope that more people attempt to compete with Pinboard.
I used Pinboard a couple of years ago but stopped using it in favor of Pocket (I can't seem to recollect the exact reason why). Pocket is great for things that I want to save for later. I have cached copies of webpages in my Pocket that are no longer online, so that is pretty neat.
Lately I've noticed that Pocket has become like a cold storage for me. I rarely ever go back to reading the bookmarks from it. I recently found a bookmarklet [1] on PH that works like Pocket but sends the bookmarks to your email instead of sending it another app. It has been working pretty well for me so far. I've been using it to send myself an email for stuff that I want to read in the near future (within the next couple of days or so) and use Pocket for saving links that I might need at some later date.
But discoverability is still an issue, I am yet to find a decent solution that can help me find new things based on my interests.
[1] https://www.emailthis.me
I use Wallabag, an open source alternative to Pocket. It generates an RSS feed which Calibre can read, download, and send to the e-reader. Pocket should do the same thing. Once a week or so I go through and mark articles as read, then open up Calibre to re-download the fresh feed.
One weird trick (heh) that has become really useful is reversing the RSS feed. So I receive two 'e-books' on my Kindle, one with new articles and one with old articles. This satisfies me, since I'm often wanting to read some new articles ASAP, while also working my way through the backlog.
Calibre lets you script the feed processing in Python. With Wallabag the feed is also paginated, so you could accomplish nearly the same thing by selecting a higher page number. Not sure if Pocket does that.
I was looking for a pocket replacement due to privacy concerns and an ever growing annoyance with ads. Wallabag has a Pocket importer and the rss feeds are a really nice touch! I even put up a parser on my website to show people my starred articles: http://desandoval.net/i-am
I'll try the ebook trick. That is a really good idea! I was looking for a reason to pull out my old B&N Nook again ;)
I use browser bookmarks for pages I visit often or intend to return to fairly soon. I use Pinboard for long-term archival where link rot is a real concern.
I'm one of the earliest users of Delicious who recently built a modern bookmarking platform. It's called Kozmos (https://getkozmos.com). It's a competitor to Pinboard, and its difference is simplifying bookmarking into one heart button, I mean you don't need to fill forms to bookmark a page anymore. It has an advanced search engine that makes you find whatever you're looking for.
I self-funded this project and worked on it past three months. If you are curious about how it looks, you can see this blog post; https://medium.com/@azerbike/introducing-kozmos-a-new-bookma...
My vision for this project is to not just build a bookmarking platform, to innovate further based on bookmarking.
I don't have that feature in Kozmos but will keep it in my mind.
I imagine pinboard supports this, but when I looked at it something stopped me from pulling the trigger, despite how desperate I am for this type of service.
For tagging, it has a different approach. It has tags behind the scenes; reads the tags from the bookmarked page, and adds also additional tags such as the type of content.
I'd like to share a project I've been working on, https://slushi.es
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...
A filesystem is a CRUD (or BREAD) tool, based on standard metadata and interfaces. Part of that is making available extra and user-useful capabilities.
Another part of the problem is that the current concept of a browser, which lacks the idea of downloading-and-storing, on an accessible and persistent basis, online content, and emphasises application and interactive functions over document and reference capabilities, is ... something of a historical accident.
Why make use of some remote pinboarding or bookmarking feature if you've got a common URL referencing system, and the ability to capture, transform, rate/rank, search, and organise into a workflow, project, or support context the information you're accessing via the Web.
And to do that by way of tools which treat this as information-on-disk, either known and extant utilities, or extensions / wrappers / enhancements of these. Most specifically, by unwrapping online content from the browser context specifically.
This goes deep into principles of application, information, and interface design and use. I'm calling the extant model a dead duck.
I also disagree that the app-ification was an historical accident; I think it's the direct result of economical forces, and I'm not convinced that an alternative system could become popular while avoiding it.
You might want to look through the inspirations part of the doc to see what's prompted this. I've also turned up a number of similar projects after having started writing that essay.
But:
* The /proc and /sys filesystems on Linux
* The /net virtual filesystem on many Solaris systems, generally tying to an NFS network via automount.
* Various Plan 9 elements, including /webfs
* The Midnight Commander virtual filesystems, including remote access over ssh.
* SSHFS.
* Tools for on-demand and responsive media response. Tracking an element down to its source, and requesting, say, PDF or ePub rather than HTML might automatically provide those. The idea of being able to run, say, 'ls' on an HTML target and have it return a list of links rather than its full content.
* Unix mail, mailx, mutt, and especially mh, which provides a shell-based perspective to email management.
* Numerous document markup and preparation systems.
* Squid, dansguardian, Tor, and other Web proxy tools.
* Libraries and catalogs, generally.
* The Internet Archive.
* HTML doc "reader-mode" tools: Readability, Pocket, Instapaper, Outline.
* Search
Again: wiring much of this into the FS layer, abstracting away the browser, treating doc requests as queues, splitting up docs, media, apps, and commerce, integrating into the user's workflow rather than the publishers.
If it's not for you, that's fine. But that's where I'm coming from.
I looked for something different and used OneNote to store complete web-pages in the cloud. Link rot was gone and organizing and searching was awesome. Until my OneNote file on OneDrive reached 8GB and performance and syncing took a nosedive.
And not so long ago I found ScrapBook for Firefox [1]. Couldn't be happier! Storing everything locally is awesome. Searching and organizing full pages and links is great. I can take care of backing up the data myself and can crawl the pages on my local drive.
I just hope that firefox keeps those plugins running, otherwise I'll have to find something else again...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/
My current favourite tool is this chrome extension(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-google-dri...), which saves pages in mht format to google drive.
It's simple to organize. A sidebar with folders, supporting drag and drop.
It stores the source 'as is' with html, css, images and optionally js. This simplifies tooling and scraping locally. Afaik, MHT is not yet fully supported on all browsers.
I can go offline and look at stored pages. This is very important for me because I have a long commute by train each day.
Since OneNote I avoid cloud storage and syncing when possible. After GB's of Data, syncing starts to be a nightmare. But, I could start syncing with dropbox, rsync or something else. And I'm free to choose. Fortunately I don't need collaboration features.
In my opinion a simple, local solution beats everything else. Actually, a feature like this should be built into the browser natively. And it's not far off from the current state: It is simply a bookmark sidebar which also supports save-page. It's kinda sad that, after so many years, browser still make it hard to store and watch content offline. The current save-page functions just don't cut it.
Anyway, our thing is https://larder.io. Our angle is that we'll sync your github starred repos as bookmarks along with everything else you save.
The rest of the services mentioned in this thread? Who knows?
also, well played Maciej
Edit:
Down-voters, you're welcome!
If you're young enough and do not go back in time on the Internet; you have no idea what it was like pre-pinboard days. If you're old enough and did not think having a paid service provides all the solutions to the Internet's underlying problem; you know what I mean above.
You will be missed.
WTF? Is that a challenge? Expect me!
It's basically remained unchanged since, with the exception of removing site previews a bit back for optimization purposes.
Always meant to rewrite & open source it, maybe now's the time...
/shameless-plug