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by evanrelf 2198 days ago
A similar bookmarking service that's been around for a long time is Pinboard

https://pinboard.in/

3 comments

Maciej has written a lot of interesting stuff about pinboard:

* pinboard's blog includes financials https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/

* general advice to neither use nor run free services that don't have a business model https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

* the great Delicious exodus of 2010, where pinboard acquired eleven thousand new users over a period of days https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/03/anatomy_of_a_crushing/

> On December 16th Yahoo held an all-hands meeting to rally the troops after a big round of layoffs. Around 11 AM someone at this meeting showed a slide with a couple of Yahoo properties grouped into three categories, one of which was ominously called "sunset". The most prominent logo in the group belonged to Delicious, our main competitor. Milliseconds later, the slide was on the web, and there was an ominous thundering sound as every Delicious user in North America raced for the exit.

> I got the message just as I was starting work for the day. My Twitter client, normally a place where I might see ten or twenty daily mentions of Pinboard, had turned into a nonstop blur of updates. My inbox was making a kind of sustained pealing sound I had never heard before. It was going to be an interesting afternoon.

It's hard to even look closer at anything comparable once pinboard has become the main destination for anything bookmark related.

I have been using it for years and since it's API is based on the original Delicious one there is most surely not a single tool out there that does not speak to Pinboard.

While there might be quite a few alternative solutions our there that are feature wise on par with (or better than) Pinboard - the latter one has a proven track record and a positive future outlook.

I was recently going to get a Pinboard subscription, but noticed the price doubled to $22/year. That's still a low price but at the same time I don't see obvious benefits over services I can use for free. This appears to be specialized for developers, so at least after an initial glance, it might be worth $24/year. Plus it comes with a six month trial.
The biggest benefit is that Pinboard has a solid track-record of NOT going out of business.
Not as solid as Microsoft
I used pinboard happily, until i amassed enough bookmarks that filtering by a tag took upwards of 15 seconds to resolve..

So I built an open-source self-hosted site for my bookmarks now:

https://github.com/jonschoning/espial

Paying for a bookmark archive should be considered a feature, an archive with no sustainable business model is less of an archive and more like a black hole.

Partly because of that I also subscribe to Pinboards optional archiving of the actual pages bookmarked, so that even if they disappear from the internet I still have a copy from the day I bookmarked it.