[diamondhead]

I use delicious for 5 years and keep a local, sync copy to make it possible to program, so that I can develop my own desktop tools.

I mean, a free Pinboard was a solution for me when I was looking for a good alternative of delicious, 2 years ago.

But it's not free. The owner claims that he'll keep maintaining forever but he will not when he lose a considerable percent of his customers.

And he'll. As I said, pinboard solves the wrong problem. An online bookmarking service can be structured in a way that will cost nothing. Couple of scripts that manipulate a text file on DropBox was the solution came to my mind in 3 seconds.

[sireat]

Another thing to keep in mind, that DropBox might be a big success now and have plenty of financing, but Dropbox keeping free accounts free is also not guaranteed. People who choose wrong file storage startup will lose out that much is certain.

Kind of ironic, that I am still bookmarking this on Delicious.

[jarek]

The other problem with your quest is that the sign-up fee is one-time, so competition won't cause him to lose that, and archiving users won't switch to a service without archiving and full-text search no matter how free and open source it is, so he won't be losing the ongoing revenue from them either.

I don't expect Pinboard to be around forever, but it's useful enough while it's alive to be worth the money for me. When it's no longer useful, I'll still have a copy of my data to grep to my heart's content.