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Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

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Re: Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

#31

Post by callmevlad »

idlewords wrote: post #25
callmevlad wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going from 5k to 5M is really impressive - congrats on your sudden impressive growth! However, the "there was no downtime" seems a bit disingenuous given my own experience signing up for the service yesterday. I received many "service unavailable" messages during signup, after clicking on the email verification link, and finally after signing up. Searching Twitter at the time for "Pinboard" showed that many other use…

It's the former - on our end we didn't see any errors logged, and had no trouble reaching the site. We did see sporadic reports on Twitter and tried to chase them down, but there was so much going on we couldn't spend much time on it. Eventually pvg made some apache config changes on the fly that seemed to banish the problem for good. If that was the general experience people had with the site last night, then it abs…

Thanks for the response and insight - I definitely understand that it's hard to keep track of sporadic issues especially when usage is exploding like yours did in the last few days.

Re: Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

#32

Post by jfb »

w1ntermute wrote: post #15
jfb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay because I want to be the customer. If I am buying something, I am able to exert market pressure on the provider. If I am a collection of poorly-anonomized data being passed around from J. Random data mining company, I lose this (admittedly, largely nominal) agency. I pay for email, I pay for hosting photos, and I pay for pinboard.

> I pay for email Out of curiosity, who do you pay to host your email?

fastmail.fm. Their webmail is pants (all webmail save GMail is pants), but their IMAP service has been 100% bulletproof. Oh, and MobileMe for pics, but that's because I'm trapped in the MobileMe universe because the value of OTA contact syncing is just ... barely ... enough, and now most of my pics are there. Vendor lock in is easy; the first hit (when I was an employee) was free.

Re: Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

#33

Post by cschmidt »

w1ntermute wrote: post #20
cschmidt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case fastmail.fm, zenfolio.com, and pinboard.in.

How is their web UI compared to Gmail, for example? Do you feel like you're missing out on any features, or do you access mail exclusively via a desktop client?

They have a really nice web GUI. I use it for access to my mail when I'm away from my laptop, where I use Mail.app. I haven't used gmail enough to do a direct comparison. The search is good, and you can set up very complicated rules to file mail into folders.

Re: Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

#34

Post by _delirium »

skorgu wrote: post #11
acconrad wrote: post #6

It baffles me that people want to pay for something that is widely available for free.

The original context is different and the tone is flippant but "If you're not paying you're not the customer, you're the product". Considering how easy it is for ad-supported businesses to suddenly become unsupported and disappear I'm willing to give a nominal fee (~$8 forever) a shot.

A problem, though, is that the inverse isn't necessarily true: if you're paying, it doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't still the product. It mostly depends on whether someone else is paying more. For example, for most magazines, you're the product even when you're paying them a subscription fee.

Re: Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

#35

Post by gms »

jfb wrote: post #32
w1ntermute wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pay for email Out of curiosity, who do you pay to host your email?

fastmail.fm. Their webmail is pants (all webmail save GMail is pants), but their IMAP service has been 100% bulletproof. Oh, and MobileMe for pics, but that's because I'm trapped in the MobileMe universe because the value of OTA contact syncing is just ... barely ... enough, and now most of my pics are there. Vendor lock in is easy; the first hit (when I was an employee) was free.

I pay for Fastmail too. But I hate myself for it. Gmail offers IMAP nowadays, no?

Re: Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

#36

Post by dho »

gms wrote: post #35
jfb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fastmail.fm. Their webmail is pants (all webmail save GMail is pants), but their IMAP service has been 100% bulletproof. Oh, and MobileMe for pics, but that's because I'm trapped in the MobileMe universe because the value of OTA contact syncing is just ... barely ... enough, and now most of my pics are there. Vendor lock in is easy; the first hit (when I was an employee) was free.

I pay for Fastmail too. But I hate myself for it. Gmail offers IMAP nowadays, no?

Yes.

Re: Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

#37

Post by anateus »

The archiving (caching of html+stylesheets+images) is what really makes this service. I've had Delicious bookmarks disappear when people migrated blog platforms, when Yahoo closed Geocities, and countless other occasions.

The only thing that can make it better is the ability to export the full caches. It does let you export 25 bookmarks (and their caches) for offline access.

I've been a member at the $25 level since regular membership was $6 :>

Re: Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

#38

Post by jfb »

jfb wrote: post #12
acconrad wrote: post #6

It baffles me that people want to pay for something that is widely available for free.

I pay because I want to be the customer. If I am buying something, I am able to exert market pressure on the provider. If I am a collection of poorly-anonomized data being passed around from J. Random data mining company, I lose this (admittedly, largely nominal) agency. I pay for email, I pay for hosting photos, and I pay for pinboard.

I also pay for a VPS that hosts my blog and Jabber endpoint. I freely admit that I am a little off on the edge of the bell curve here.

Re: Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

#39

Post by avinashv »

idlewords wrote: post #17
avinashv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (took a few hours because they are experiencing a lot of traffic right now) Honestly, I think that's unacceptable for a relatively unknown service that charges a steep price ($25/year for _bookmarking_ is pretty crazy). To not get good uptime and speedy access and have a bold red banner on the top of your homepage claiming poor scaling is not encouraging.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. There was no downtime, and no slow access. We went from our normal rate of 5k bookmark writes per day to over 5 million in a 24 hour period without going offline. Hell, we didn't even get slow . Our median page load times stayed well under a third of a second. We had no advance notice of the announcement and had to handle the spike in traffic on the fly, on one server. Our comp…

> There was no downtime, and no slow access.

There was for me. I tried signing up after that comment but had trouble. In fact, I thought the site was just slow in general. It was the first time I've visited, so I don't know if that response time was normal, but it was slow nonetheless.

Based on other responses here and what I've heard from friends and seen on Twitter etc., I don't think I am the only one that felt this. I'm glad you're happy with your performance, and I think it's great you guys were a destination a lot of delicious users chose to head to, but I was just expressing an opinion.

Re: Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious

#40

Post by skorgu »

_delirium wrote: post #34
skorgu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original context is different and the tone is flippant but "If you're not paying you're not the customer, you're the product". Considering how easy it is for ad-supported businesses to suddenly become unsupported and disappear I'm willing to give a nominal fee (~$8 forever) a shot.

A problem, though, is that the inverse isn't necessarily true: if you're paying, it doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't still the product. It mostly depends on whether someone else is paying more. For example, for most magazines, you're the product even when you're paying them a subscription fee.

Good point. TANSSAAFL.
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