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Pinboard Turns Eleven

blog.pinboard.in

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Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven

#71

Post by [deleted] »

idlewords wrote: post #69
floatingatoll wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're worrying about a business with a estimated minimum profit margin of 79%, using the most pessimistic assumptions I could think of. I wouldn't be worrying yet. In 2017^: revenue was $259k, costs were estimated $17k, archives 31.8TBy, 126M URLs. In 2020: revenue was $212k, costs were not specified, archives 82TBy, 192M URLs. Archives are 2.58x higher, URLs are 1.52x higher. So taking the higher of the two multipl…

Thanks for reassuring these message board Aristotles that my business is solvent! A couple of data points to help you calculate: * active users is not the same as paying users, it's people who did something in the last month * costs in 2020 will be something like $17,000 for hosting plus $8,000 for hardware and a few thousand bucks in travel/hotel costs to the colo. So say $30K. * the reason hardware costs are high i…

[deleted]

Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven

#72

Post by tptacek »

Broken record: I get that people are really into tagging and I see how I could, like, instead of writing HN comments or playing Dark Souls, nurture and groom an elegant garden of them for my own 10,000 bookmarks.

But that's not why I use Pinboard. It turns out ("bookmark people" apparently already know this) that a huge collection of bookmarks basically functions as a personal search engine. My primary interface to Pinboard is a "pin:" search engine shortcut.

What makes this so effective for me is that if you have an archive account (you should have an archive account; it's the best money I've spent for a computer thing easily), Pinboard indexes the contents of PDF, so I can instantly search the contents of all the papers I've bookmarked.

I don't even think about what I'm bookmarking, what to tag things, or even what to title them; I just cram 'em all in there and let search figure it out. And it works great. Pinboard is a steal.

Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven

#73

Post by StavrosK »

idlewords wrote: post #70
StavrosK wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of that is on me, I haven't given it the love it deserves, but I'm currently rewriting it and will be modernizing it, making it responsive, and adding new features.

Enjoy, and congratulations on running a long-lived solvent business that actually answers its email.

Thank you, and likewise, congratulations for running a long-lived successful business!

Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven

#74

Post by idlewords »

tptacek wrote: post #72

Broken record: I get that people are really into tagging and I see how I could, like, instead of writing HN comments or playing Dark Souls, nurture and groom an elegant garden of them for my own 10,000 bookmarks. But that's not why I use Pinboard. It turns out ("bookmark people" apparently already know this) that a huge collection of bookmarks basically functions as a personal search engine. My primary interface to P…

Thanks for the testimonial!

I thought bookmarking was incredibly stupid until Joshua Schachter explained it to me like this: when you save something, tag it with the words you would use to search for it six months later. It blew my mind and eventually gave me a livelihood.

Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven

#75

Post by teejmya »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #57

I became a Pinboard customer on December 17, 2010 and currently have 7,940 bookmarks, the most recent pin was added yesterday. It's a great service. I recommend it to everyone.

Thats very impressive. I joined in September 27, 2011 and have only 1,830 bookmarks.

Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven

#77

Post by aptwebapps »

bachmeier wrote: post #47
cpach wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it’s definitely worth the price. Dunno why he doesn’t do trials though. Maybe it’s not worth the hassle? Those interested in the service can get a good feeling for it by looking at the product tour and recent bookmarks. And if you sign up and don’t like it then $22 is not that much money[1]. (No idea if he does refunds or not.) [1] In a Western country that is. I know $22 can be a lot of money depending on the…

> And if you sign up and don’t like it then $22 is not that much money[1]. ?? I'm not giving $22 to someone I don't know and then saying, "Well the service sucks, but it's not much money." He claims to give refunds, but the time cost for me - assuming I actually get it - would be far more than $22. Again, this is 2020, the world has moved on from this type of business model.

Wait, the time cost of asking for a refund or the time cost of trying out a service you ended up not using? The former seems trifling, and the latter applies even if there was a free trial.

Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven

#78

Post by skeppy »

bachmeier wrote: post #21
thaumaturgy wrote: post #12

Pinboard is my secret weapon for those obnoxious lists of citations I sometimes get to spackle onto the end of comments on the internet. I've been on there since December 27, 2010 (Merry Christmas to me), and currently have 8,698 bookmarks across 1,544 different tags. I'd have a few hundred more if I could hurry up and transfer all the open tabs from ios safari. ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user…

> ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers My story might be relevant. I only recently learned about Pinboard. $22/year isn't terrible, but it's just a bookmarking service. Free trial? Nope - you need to pull out your credit card and fork over $22. You get seven days to request a refund. (Will I actually get it? No idea who's holding my money.) He's happy to boast about competitors disappearing,…

I tried Pinboard earlier this year. I found it too slow and was having issues with just general timeouts trying to categorize my bookmarks.

I requested a refund and got it straightaway. Along with a kind reply from the owner. No issues. (I think I had paid via PayPal so I was hardly worried). Also... $22.

Must everything be a free trial? There’s a lot of issues and costs associated with that for businesses (and increasingly regulation).

Now that I see this post from the owner, I’m inclined to sign back up again. I could have been one of those actually attempting to do a mass import when he was fixing it. And him being on 10-year old tech probably greatly contributed to my personal experience.

As the product itself goes, I think it’s worthy and useful. Having it be mobile-friendly will be helpful not so much for me but when I want to share a list of links to some other people I know who haven’t used a full-size keyboard in five years.

Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven

#79

Post by astrange »

techntoke wrote: post #18

Would love to see a Go-based bookmarking server (no JavaScript) and CLI/ncurses app that uses yaml/toml/json files for bookmarks: google: tags: - search engine url: https://google.com duckduckgo: tags: - search engine url: https://duckduckgo.com

Is that your requirements doc? “As a customer, I want a bookmarking tool written in Go that uses yaml files”?

Re: Pinboard Turns Eleven

#80

Post by idlewords »

skeppy wrote: post #78
bachmeier wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers My story might be relevant. I only recently learned about Pinboard. $22/year isn't terrible, but it's just a bookmarking service. Free trial? Nope - you need to pull out your credit card and fork over $22. You get seven days to request a refund. (Will I actually get it? No idea who's holding my money.) He's happy to boast about competitors disappearing,…

I tried Pinboard earlier this year. I found it too slow and was having issues with just general timeouts trying to categorize my bookmarks. I requested a refund and got it straightaway. Along with a kind reply from the owner. No issues. (I think I had paid via PayPal so I was hardly worried). Also... $22. Must everything be a free trial? There’s a lot of issues and costs associated with that for businesses (and incre…

Hey, thanks for reconsidering the site! It sounds like you caught things in mid-maintenance, or on a day when someone decided to crawl everything with no pause between requests.

For what it's worth, one feature I want to make work on the site is "create a sharable list of links to give people", it's a use case that comes up a lot.

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