Raindrop is good, but I had problems exporting my bookmarks. I clicked 'export' and the email with the download link didn't arrive. Contacted support and heard nothing back from them. Got the impression someone's asleep at the wheel after that, so I deleted my account.
Raindrop is superb. One of my favorite "tiny apps". It just works.
One of its nicest features is that it can function as a mini-browser. For example, let's say you're working on a project where you need to have a lot of different sites open for documentation, guides, references and so on. Instead of opening them as tabs in a browser, you can bookmark them in Raindrop and then use Raindrop as the browser.
I'm referring to the native app, which is a browser, albeit a limited one. You can have the bookmarks in the left side and the browser view on the right side.
I just started using this because my iPhone refuses to sync Chrome Bookmarks and decided I needed another solution.
It's not bad, but I haven't used it for long. I like that it finds dupes and has thumbnails like a news reader. I used yt-download to extract my YouTube favorites and playlists video urls into a .csv file and loaded those in as well, and it did the right thing. So we'll see.
Off-topic question-observation: I've been wondering lately why "new features are released regularly" is generally considered a boon when talking about software and specifically in a product that serves a relatively simple and clear-cut need like a bookmark stash. My TV does one job: it shows pictures really fast on a grid of pixels. Sure it's nice that, hardware permitting, support can be added for new media layer video protocols over time (the marvel of software), but I don't need it to be getting entirely new features to be happy. It's kinda nice that it just sits there and does its job. It does it so well that I keep coming back to the brand for new models as needed.
> I've been wondering lately why "new features are released regularly" is generally considered a boon when talking about software and specifically in a product that serves a relatively simple and clear-cut need like a bookmark stash
There's a very good talk by Moxie "the ecosystem is moving"[1][2] and the reason you need your software to be changing constantly, even when it's doing one thing well, is because all other software is changing, moving requirements, compatibility, and integrations.
Also, it's not like we have no progress in UX. I quite like the light/dark theme in apps changing according to the time of day. It only really started working well within the last two years after all apps adapted.
I agree with your general point, but I don't think it's applicable here really. Raindrop targets users who aren't looking for "a relatively simple and clear-cut... bookmark stash". That's part of what it offers, but the actual value over a myriad of other tools is in the broader feature set, like web page highlights, uploading files and treating them as bookmarks, automatic bookmarking from other web services (e.g., auto bookmarking Twitter favorites), etc. There's still a ways to go for the service without departing from the core vision. For example, one of the more popular user requests seems to be for bookmarked PDFs to have the same highlighting options as bookmarked web pages.
Since I started using Raindrop, the developer has added features like permanent snapshots of pages you save, the ability to highlight things on webpages, automatic daily backups, tag autocompletion, and has made significant improvements to the Safari extension and iOS app. I find a lot of the new features useful, as I'm sure most users do. If I wanted a simple bookmarking service, I would use one (or more likely make my own).
> a product that serves a relatively simple and clear-cut need like a bookmark stash
By the same reductionist logic, you could argue that people don't need a bookmarking service at all, they can just save bookmarks in a text file. Simple, clear-cut. No fuss.
Raindrop is great. I have been using it for a few months and it is well worth it. They also have good integrations and are adding more. I use it with NewsBlur quite a lot.