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Ideas that have been beaten to death

ruky.me

31–40 of 130 posts

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#32
I pay for Pinboard. I have 5K bookmarks and daily add about 1-10 new ones. I will never read most of them. But when push comes to shove, I can easily find that BioTech article that generated a lot of discussion on HN because I tagged it as "hn" and "biotech". And if that article disappears from the web, Pinboard should still have a cached version. So now I can bookmark an article close tab #231 and fall asleep peacefully.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#33
post #6

Well you could say the same about todo lists. Yet a lot of people make money with todo lists. I am sure there are some people making money with bookmarking somewhere…

Yet, todo lists are about keep tracking of items you will tick off. They are no meant to be perpetual. Bookmarks can be. I have bookmarked intranet systems for that exact reason.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#34

100% agree that bookmarks need a better solution. Whoever does it will change the game. I'm a bookmarks hoarder. If I encounter a useful site, I bookmark it. I have about 20,000 bookmarks on Chrome now. Someone on HN once described bookmarks as a "knowledge graph". That's an apt description for what they do for me. I've long given-up trying to neatly organize my bookmarks in folders. Now I use lots of keywords (as ps…

20,000? And pseudo-tags system has scaled to accommodate them?

I converted some to "Web Apps" (Linux Mint)

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#35
I pay for Pocket, it's been my main bookmarking tool for years ever since Feedly got too intricate for my needs. I was a founding member of Feedly when Google Reader went down but it got too many features and too complicated for my taste.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#36
post #22

The other idea / product that has been beaten to death would be note taking, todo lists, and similar... illusory productivity tools. I say illusory because writing down notes and tasks feels like you're being productive, but they really aren't. I think these are really popular to be built because they are simple in terms of technology. Most early developers can fit the concept of a todo list in their head - it's what…

Hmm, I would say the process of note taking is an important part of my retention. I refer to my notes a lot. I worked with a guy who never took notes and was able to remember everything. I’m not that smart!

I think the GP referred more to those people who write down a lot but (almost) never refer to their notes or review them. For many people, after several years they will have a giant repository of hundreds or thousands of notes with very poor organization and the value decreases rapidly because they can't find anything anymore.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#37

The other idea / product that has been beaten to death would be note taking, todo lists, and similar... illusory productivity tools. I say illusory because writing down notes and tasks feels like you're being productive, but they really aren't. I think these are really popular to be built because they are simple in terms of technology. Most early developers can fit the concept of a todo list in their head - it's what…

Anything which is both conceptually simple and used by/useful for developers is very likely to produce a huge number of variant products. It's a step up from todo lists but think how many text editors there are.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#38

The problem with bookmarking applications is that aside from a few websites you visit regularly, browsing and searching your bookmarks isn't going to be substantially different from browsing and searching the web, so you can just as well do the latter. If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks, then this would also be a revolutionary new way to browse the web (or your filesystem, while we'r…

> If somebody came up with a revolutionary new way to browse bookmarks

What about:

- browser saves content of each bookmark

- browser’s search bar searches both existing bookmarks _and_ queries the user’s configured search engine

- browser shows results (not too many) from bookmarks above the search engine’s ones (in place of its adverts and removing duplicates would be better, but that might lead to lawsuits about tampering with web pages/deteriorating search results)

Maybe, your browser should also search your entire hard disk, email, etc?

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#39
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the core part of this bookmark problem and dilemma is the fact that browsers execute their bookmarking functionality poorly.

Why would Google ever implement decent bookmarks aka local search for all your data? They need to track you for their business.

Yes that is true of course. But at least forks of Chrome, FF, can try to implement a decent bookmarking feature in their browser.

Maybe FF is not doing it because they own pocket. But true there is conflict of interest that I didn't see until I read your comment.

Re: Ideas that have been beaten to death

#40

The other idea / product that has been beaten to death would be note taking, todo lists, and similar... illusory productivity tools. I say illusory because writing down notes and tasks feels like you're being productive, but they really aren't. I think these are really popular to be built because they are simple in terms of technology. Most early developers can fit the concept of a todo list in their head - it's what…

Bookmarking, note taking, todo all have one important characteristic in common. They all require users with discipline and organization skills.

Every indie-hacker is bound to see gaps in existing solutions based on their biased ideas of organizing. Many times these ideas won't work out for the creators themselves as they over-estimate their capacity to maintain discipline over a stretch.

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