"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.
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.
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.
Check out 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.
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.
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?
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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)
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.
Manual import/export isn't really a useful option when you are using multiple browsers on multiple machines, let alone sometimes wanting to access things on public machines.
You were also, at that point, restricted to arbitrary hierarchies rather than arbitrary tagging. The ability to slice bookmarks over multiple categories is stupidly useful (for me anyway.)
And - crazy as it sounds - there was no really good way to share links. No Twitter or Facebook or Pinterst, so people had to use their blog. Or they could put it on Delicious, and others could subscribe to their feed via RSS (Originally there wasn't a way to view what all your contacts had bookmarked at once).
But Pinterst showed how the "social" side of "social bookmarking" should really be done.
Or they had to email them to their friends! It was a dark age.
I remember showing the original del.icio.us to my friends and them all saying "I don't get it." And then I said "instead of emailing everybody links, you can just post them here and we'll all get them automatically" and they went "Ah! Now I get it!"
Yeah I understood that. But unless your friends are constantly checking for new links shared on Delicious, you would have to notify them that you've posted a new link. SMS, phone call, AIM, email, somehow.
You could subscribe via RSS. I had a bunch of delicious feeds that basically just fed me new sh*t on exactly the topic I was interested in. Because they had been tagged by humans I trusted. It was great ;-)
You just ignore that there still isn't. There is a cloud for each browser. Which is not the same. Also it's all or nothing. And it's all public if you consider the current offerings term of services.
With delicious From day one you bookmarklets that worked with anybrowser. And a kickass Mozilla sidebar thingy
Depends what your needs are. If you're mostly using one browser on one machine you're fine.
Need something that's cross-platform, cross-browser with arbitrary tagging and suddenly you're looking at third party service.
Add to that the discover side of shared bookmarking tools (Gee - I wonder what everybody else has tagged with "foo") and a third party service is the only thing that will help.
I was a really happy delicious used before the post-yahoo rewrite. Then they lost about 1000 bookmarks of mine so I moved to pinboard - where I'm not quite unhappy enough to go write my perfect system ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I was thinking about browser extension which tracks time you spent on various websites during a time interval (a month?). You specify a sum you are willing to spend, and that sum is divided proportionally to time spent. Now if each domain had something like special /btc.html page with an address, the extension could automatically send your money to corresponding websites.
I think it would be a lot easier to just charge them $6 once a year. Or just a one time fee, like pinboard.in does. (Currently $10.38, which is easy on credit cards.)
Do people still use *Social bookmarking? Well, for most of the people using the web, Facebook is the common source of news / links / any hot discussion going on anywhere on the internet. Twitter too, but I have read somewhere that generally, Facebook is the only source nowadays.
I certainly see Delicious and HN as being in the same landscape, but different. Delicious has the concept of friends, so there is a social network aspect to it. HN has comments, so there is a forum aspect to it.
I don't have many friends on Delicious, and no friends with really similar interests, so the social network aspect is not worth much to me. HN has lots of reasonably bright and knowledgeable users, so the comments are worth something to me. It's the classic private vs public dichotomy in social networks.
If Delicious could somehow mix in some of the forum aspect that HN has, it could become enormously valuable to me. If it let me read and participate in discussions like HN, but focused on the areas i am specifically interested in (more Rust, less Bitcoin), it would replace HN in an instant.
Very crappy social bookmarking maybe. Without tags it's really tough to go back and find anything especially cause 99%+ of the posts are not of interest to me. With delicio.us I just put a bunch of tags on everything I bookmark and then it's super easy to go back and find later.
I use pinboard for private bookmarking. In fact that's one of the improvements of pinboard over delicious. At the time I used delicious I always felt that I had to work to keep my bookmarks private. I set my privacy setting once at pinboard and I never have to think about it.
For me, pinboard is bookmarks that I don't have to synch, and have automatically available at home, work or wherever.
I still use Delicious and love it. Just a very convenient way to save sites that I might want to refer back to in the future. The killer feature is tagging/descriptions/searching that metadata.
I read somewhere that Yahoo refused to sell delicious back to Joshua Schachter when they were looking to ditch it.
I moved to pinboard.in when it came out and it's exactly what I need, nothing more, and the guy who runs it keeps it simple. Really loved the sync to import all my existing delicious bookmarks.
Pinterest is as good an execution of bookmarking (even if not thought about this way) as I've seen. What sets it apart is that content is very visual, organized by content and boards (directories) and easily discoverable. I visited delicious again, and all I see are tags and page titles.
I'm currently using Firefox Sync between work and home. There are some issues, but mostly because I'm a compulsive bookmark hoarder. Except for cross-browser support, is there any reason to switch from my current set-up?
- Efficient search,
- tagging,
- tag specific pages,
- if you pay extra, pinboard will crawl the page and save it.
Basically, if you ever feel like you'd need to go back and find something you bookmarked a couple of years ago, then yes. If you're just saving a few bookmarks in your browser, then probably not.
I use Pinboard to read cryptography papers and follow IETF security mailing lists; it allows me to skim large amounts of material, spot anything that might look useful, bookmark it quickly, and move on.
I have a browser search engine shortcut so that if I type "pin <something>" into the URL bar, Pinboard will search all my bookmarks and tags and comments and (apparently) full text of the things it's archived, including the full text of PDFs.
So, if right now I wanted to find exactly the paper where Rogaway described the powering-up mechanism in the XEX cipher, I can just type "pin rogaway powering" and very quickly have the article in front of me.
I'm not sure how I would manage to do that with browser bookmarks.
I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like Pinboard useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn't (to me) have much to do with bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search".
I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like Pinboard useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn't (to me) have much to do with bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search".
Exactly. Pinboard is my personal record of everything online I find useful or interesting enough to remember.
Delicious is from a different era. I don't know if you all remember, but it was launched and influential when "social" powered sites (see Digg) were all the rage.
The most powerful feature of Delicious for me was the /popular/ page, which showed me at a quick glance what sites/pages were trending for that day. Usually it reflected what was on the home page of Digg, and a few other influential tech sites.
Moving forward, the idea of user generated content & socially powered websites lost some steam (although the concept is still around) and Delicious lost it's chance to make the site into a profitable force online.
In its day, Delicious was so great. I especially liked seeing what the rest of my "network" was bookmarking publicly. The UI was no-frills and it was perfect at that. As times changed, I moved on to pinboard.in then largely to storing locally and using Xmarks, to now relying just on Chrome's sync across all devices.
It's regrettable that Delicious didn't succeed in the hands Yahoo. At this stage, the owners would probably be best trying to sell to someone or something food-related.
I've been a long time Delicious user, and I'm still a Delicious user. I used to use the Firefox browser plugin until that stopped working. But I still continue with Delicious. Why not? It does what I need it to do.
But now I feel like I just want a self-hosted version of what Delicious does. I use my bookmarks for my own sake - I really don't care about sharing them with others or discovering new links through Delicious. Should I self host or is there a better option for me?
Time to download my links before they disappear, I think.
But I don't just use Chrome and I want to access my bookmarks not just on my own browser. I want access on all my browsers and in any setting where I wish to reach them.
If I was always using the same browser then Chrome would work, but there are times I'm working at a client site and don't have the ability to either use Chrome or sign in to my personal account, yet I wish to access a stored bookmark. This is where Delicious comes / came into the picture...
The didn't do a very good job during their tenure. As a user all I could tell that they did was re-architect and redesign the site several times without actually pushing the platform forward at all.
They also did the ultimate sin - lost a bunch of my bookmarks in the transfer from Yahoo. I had backups - so yay - but it meant I never trusted the service again.
101 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 83.2 ms ] threadThis is a good time to remind everyone to use pinboard.in - the fee is one-time and you can sync from del.icio.us.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
(Here's a lesson - business owners will often not even know what services they're signed up to!).
http://pinboard.in/
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.
On the other hand for a consumer web-mail service, or something like a DigitalOcean, I would definitely pay an amount like that.
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 ;-)
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.
You were also, at that point, restricted to arbitrary hierarchies rather than arbitrary tagging. The ability to slice bookmarks over multiple categories is stupidly useful (for me anyway.)
But Pinterst showed how the "social" side of "social bookmarking" should really be done.
I remember showing the original del.icio.us to my friends and them all saying "I don't get it." And then I said "instead of emailing everybody links, you can just post them here and we'll all get them automatically" and they went "Ah! Now I get it!"
Edit: Am I wrong?
Meaning, yes you in the past had to share links via email. Delicious solved that with both parties on Delicious.
Or they subscribed in a RSS reader.
With delicious From day one you bookmarklets that worked with anybrowser. And a kickass Mozilla sidebar thingy
Need something that's cross-platform, cross-browser with arbitrary tagging and suddenly you're looking at third party service.
Add to that the discover side of shared bookmarking tools (Gee - I wonder what everybody else has tagged with "foo") and a third party service is the only thing that will help.
I was a really happy delicious used before the post-yahoo rewrite. Then they lost about 1000 bookmarks of mine so I moved to pinboard - where I'm not quite unhappy enough to go write my perfect system ;-)
http://pinboard.in has very nicely solved the problem for me, with tagging and search. Well worth the $10 one-time fee.
> 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.
Ripple then? Again that rests on adoption for Ripple, which is probably even smaller than a lot of alt coins.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3305
"The new fee after this patch is 0.5 cents."
I'm guessing y-axis is cents. Looks like it's about $0.25 - $0.30 these days.
(sorry for broken english)
In any case, Pinboard.in is all around better, so I guess the redesign had it's upside.
I don't have many friends on Delicious, and no friends with really similar interests, so the social network aspect is not worth much to me. HN has lots of reasonably bright and knowledgeable users, so the comments are worth something to me. It's the classic private vs public dichotomy in social networks.
If Delicious could somehow mix in some of the forum aspect that HN has, it could become enormously valuable to me. If it let me read and participate in discussions like HN, but focused on the areas i am specifically interested in (more Rust, less Bitcoin), it would replace HN in an instant.
For me, pinboard is bookmarks that I don't have to synch, and have automatically available at home, work or wherever.
I moved to pinboard.in when it came out and it's exactly what I need, nothing more, and the guy who runs it keeps it simple. Really loved the sync to import all my existing delicious bookmarks.
-Around $10 for a lifetime membership.
-Supports tags.
-Great search functionality.
-Bookmarklets for most browsers.
-Public or private bookmarks.
-Lightweight and fast.
I've been using it since 2010 and absolutely love it.
Basically, if you ever feel like you'd need to go back and find something you bookmarked a couple of years ago, then yes. If you're just saving a few bookmarks in your browser, then probably not.
I have a browser search engine shortcut so that if I type "pin <something>" into the URL bar, Pinboard will search all my bookmarks and tags and comments and (apparently) full text of the things it's archived, including the full text of PDFs.
So, if right now I wanted to find exactly the paper where Rogaway described the powering-up mechanism in the XEX cipher, I can just type "pin rogaway powering" and very quickly have the article in front of me.
I'm not sure how I would manage to do that with browser bookmarks.
I too find it hard to articulate what makes bookmarking services like Pinboard useful. Part of the problem is that it doesn't (to me) have much to do with bookmarking, so much as it does with "personal search".
Exactly. Pinboard is my personal record of everything online I find useful or interesting enough to remember.
The most powerful feature of Delicious for me was the /popular/ page, which showed me at a quick glance what sites/pages were trending for that day. Usually it reflected what was on the home page of Digg, and a few other influential tech sites.
Moving forward, the idea of user generated content & socially powered websites lost some steam (although the concept is still around) and Delicious lost it's chance to make the site into a profitable force online.
I used it for years to store and tag bookmarks so I could share them between machines.
But I deleted my account soon after Yahoo took over.
It's regrettable that Delicious didn't succeed in the hands Yahoo. At this stage, the owners would probably be best trying to sell to someone or something food-related.
But now I feel like I just want a self-hosted version of what Delicious does. I use my bookmarks for my own sake - I really don't care about sharing them with others or discovering new links through Delicious. Should I self host or is there a better option for me?
Time to download my links before they disappear, I think.
If I was always using the same browser then Chrome would work, but there are times I'm working at a client site and don't have the ability to either use Chrome or sign in to my personal account, yet I wish to access a stored bookmark. This is where Delicious comes / came into the picture...
Maybe my use case is different?
That's me, I decided to write my own. One day I'll do it too.