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Don't Be A Free User

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Re: Don't Be A Free User

#101

Post by diamondhead »

jarek wrote: post #100
diamondhead wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I search my bookmarks with grep thanks to a local, plain text copy of them. It's so fast and can be programmed in a way that I can search I bookmarks before I open my browser. There are way better architectures to have an unsocial bookmarking service. Pinboard has the worst one and because its focus is to copy Delicious and make money. In other words, it creates the problem first, and gives users an expensive solutio…

Sounds like Pinboard isn't the solution for you. However, it evidently appeals to many, myself included. I don't think I ever have my browser not open. I use something like four different computers, not including mobile devices, and appreciate the central copy without having to think about syncing it. I don't worry about setting up scripts on my local machine or updating my local plain text copy so that it can be sea…

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.

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#102

Post by jarek »

diamondhead wrote: post #101
jarek wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Pinboard isn't the solution for you. However, it evidently appeals to many, myself included. I don't think I ever have my browser not open. I use something like four different computers, not including mobile devices, and appreciate the central copy without having to think about syncing it. I don't worry about setting up scripts on my local machine or updating my local plain text copy so that it can be sea…

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…

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.

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#103

Post by jarek »

gcr wrote: post #94

At risk of squabbling over semantics, "Free software", as used in the article, is orthoganal to open-source software. If the source code for these websites were released, even at the end, there would be no issue. Case in point: Etherpad released their source code just before taking their wave dive, starting Piratepad et al.

While you are correct that the article takes some liberties with its use of "free software", having the source code won't help you much with applications that need beefier hosting to truly be useful.

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#104

Post by jarek »

Tcepsa wrote: post #30

Clearly Google is going to get bought out by somebody any day now and we can kiss those searching, mapping, and mail services goodbye. As are Facebook and Twitter--better find someone that you can pay for your social networking, stat! And obviously Hacker News isn't going to be around for long...

Hacker News isn't exactly ran off VC money and in need of an exit.

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#105

Post by alex_s »

viscanti wrote: post #54
gkoberger wrote: post #16

This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers. See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter. As for the former, there's an unlimited number of examples (for a…

The article seems to be in response to the recent Gowalla acquisition. If Gowalla had been successful and still used, it may have continued on. Facebook isn't shutting it down because it was a free service. They're shutting it down because it's unpopular and unprofitable. To use the Gowalla acquisition as evidence that companies acquire other companies just to shut them down is silly. All it shows is that a company c…

Kind of agree. It seems that Gowalla case is team acquisition rather than product.

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#106

Post by jarek »

phillmv wrote: post #50
Sukotto wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest you backup your bookmarks on a regular basis using the handy export page http://pinboard.in/export/ You might also want to tone down the snark.

What snark? I'm being totally straight here. I love Maciej and all of his body of work and I aim to give him many of my dollars in the future - but this is something I'm going to nitpick on. The reason why I feel comfortable using Pinboard on a day to day has nothing to do with the fact that I've paid for it because it's just as fragile and likely to suddenly disappear. It has a high "hit-by-a-bus" factor. It's becau…

This actually occurred to me and kinda bothered me as well. I saw an example during the FBI raid outage when the site was down in the morning on the east coast and there were no updates because he was still asleep on the west coast.

I just saw a post on Twitter from him about this: http://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/144174085629427714: "pals of mine have agreed to wind down the site in an orderly way and open-source the code if something happens to me"

That being said, I would still keep fairly regularly back-ups. With export this great, there's no excuse (short of maybe getting monthly back-up dumps delivered by email).

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#107

Post by nl »

dotBen wrote: post #19
garrettdimon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the point is less about revenue being a guarantee that it won't happen and more about the fact that a lack of profit makes it increasingly likely that the product will eventually be shuttered because free isn't a sustainable model.

But that also doesn't really ring true either because a "lack of profit" doesn't necessarily mean that an acquiring party will shut said service down either. I doubt Friendfeed makes Facebook any money, and was clearly a talent acquisition (Bret is their CTO now) but they still keep it running. You're right that anyone using any tool/service with an unsustainable model needs to be cautious. But there's a lot more to…

FriendFeed is a pretty special case.

Bret Taylor (ex FF) is Facebook CTO, and clearly wants FF to keep running. Since it's cheap, who's going to tell him "no"?

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#108

Post by r0s »

I'm all for it, transparent business models!

Also, I will no longer tolerate advertizing in my paid content. Seems great, when do we start?

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#109

Post by sharjeel »

hyyypr wrote: post #67
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delicious, for all intents and purposes, WAS shut down, and a new, barely related site was put up in its place. I was a Delicious user for years, with thousands of links tagged, and I continued using it for as long as I could stand under Avos, but the features that they cut and/or broke in the transition finally made me throw up my hands, give up, and switch...first to Trunk.ly, which Avos then bought and shut down (…

What exactly do you have against delicious' new interface ? I continue using it as I always did, and except for the design I barely see any difference. Maybe I'm missing some key feature here ?

There is a lot of difference. They've basically killed the social bookmarking and moved more towards those funny-pics, funny-videos portals pointing towards different sies.

You can take a look at the previous HN discussion about the relaunch: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3042207

Re: Don't Be A Free User

#110

Post by ianstormtaylor »

hyyypr wrote: post #67
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delicious, for all intents and purposes, WAS shut down, and a new, barely related site was put up in its place. I was a Delicious user for years, with thousands of links tagged, and I continued using it for as long as I could stand under Avos, but the features that they cut and/or broke in the transition finally made me throw up my hands, give up, and switch...first to Trunk.ly, which Avos then bought and shut down (…

What exactly do you have against delicious' new interface ? I continue using it as I always did, and except for the design I barely see any difference. Maybe I'm missing some key feature here ?

Slightly unrelated, but what you should say is visuals instead of "design". It would be pretty impossible for you to actually mean "design" and have your statement be sane.
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