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Ask HN: Bookmarking Tool for Developers – Yay or Nay?

4 points by aswerty ↗ HN
I wanted to pass an idea by you folks and ask for a little bit of help.

I'm currently trying to figure out if a bookmarking service for software developers would make sense. When I tell people my idea I generally get asked; "do developers bookmark differently than anyone else?". And the answer is no. But I do believe (and am in the process of verifying) that developers bookmark to a greater extent than most other people, particularly web developers. So I want to build a bookmarking tool specifically for developers although initially I don't expect any significant differences between my tool and a more general bookmarking tool. But as I progresses I expect to discover what developer centric features people find useful (this might just be simple things like integration with collaboration tools). This idea has come about because I still, after many years, find the bookmarking process lacking (and I'm familiar with various options for bookmarking).

So at the moment I'm looking for feedback on whether people think if there is any value to this idea – so any comments on that would be appreciated. Also I'm trying to figure out what developers think of bookmarking and how they currently do it; so I created a survey but at this point I've exhausted my own network so I'm in need of some developers who like helping others out! I'll be releasing the results of said survey once it's completed so I think it will hopefully be useful for others regardless of whether I continue with my idea or not.

The survey is at the following address:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/dev-bookmark-survey

Thanks for reading!

12 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 31.9 ms ] thread
spocked
Just finished filling the survey. Next time, try to not force the user to select the "Never" option. If I have not used that OS or browser, I will simply skip over it.
aswerty
That's a good point, thanks for filling it out.
outericky
I've been using Dragdis here and there. But not religiously. It is better than traditional bookmarking in my opinion.
aswerty
Yeah Dragdis seems to be one of the better ones.
outericky
The main reason being that I can easily save images/video easily. Links are easy enough with alternate ways.
Meltdown
I use Flipboard for my bookmarks, I have about 10 private mags that I flip bookmarks into.

I've found saving bookmarks just to my browser tends to be a bit of a black hole, stuff goes in, but never comes out.

aswerty
Yeah the black hole problem is definitely something a lot of people bump into. I hadn't actually come across Flipboard before, seems similar to Pinterest.
1123581321
I paid a one-time fee for Pinboard and the survey doesn't have an option for one-time payments.
aswerty
That's a good point. I knew that was how Pinboard worked but I guess it slipped my mind. Having catch all survey questions is more work than it looks! Thanks for your time, much appreciated.
jason_wurzel
i use evernote a lot for bookmarking (often saving only urls, or whole articles), bookmarking with the browser tends to be a black hole for me too, as others said. with evernote i can assign tags to the bookmarked item, so i can find related things better later on.
notduncansmith
I use Raindrop.io (Mac app + Chrome extension) for all of my bookmarking, and it's been really great. Easy to use, looks nice, has great search.
aswerty
I love their name! Like Dragdis they definitely seem like a nice alternative to the in-browser functionality.