Was just about to go to bed but felt compelled to comment on this. Several years ago, or whenever Pinboard was a little less than $9, I signed up for it on a whim but kind of thought my coworker was crazy...except for content sites (i.e. Spotify and Netflix)...paying for an online service just seemed alien, and paying for a bookmarking service, a feature that has been functional in browsers for a long while...that seemed completely bonkers (I never got into delicio.us or its competitors). The only reason I can possibly think of for having joined was that my co-worker is much smarter and more efficient than I am.
Today, Pinboard is to me the epitome of a life/work-enhancing product...I use it daily to capture HN links, it's incredibly unintrusive, and not once since I've been on it has it been down when I've needed to refer to my bookmarks. I keep forgetting that I've already paid a one-time fee for it, and if it decided to secretly charge me on a reoccurring basis, I probably wouldn't notice and might not even care.
I don't think it's coincidence that my fondness of Pinboard correlates with how I've changed as a developer, becoming much less interested in do-it-all frameworks such as Rails, and aspiring to spend more time at the command line. I've had a much greater appreciation for simplicity, not because I'm particularly Zen, but because I don't want a service or a program or a framework to do everything for me. In the journalism/research world, people frequently discuss tips and advice on bookmarking apps. I keep pushing Pinboard.in but I don't think many people have been interested in it. Why would they pay for it when all it does is record bookmarks in plaintext, whereas Evernote saves so many different kinds of media, has an iPad app, and is free, even if it crashes once in awhile and can be unpredictable in how it saves content, etc. etc...but hey, it seems like a real product, right?
I just shake my head. It took me a few years of pain to realize that even the slightest bit of friction prevents a tool from being used daily...and when your job depends on quick, efficient information retrieval, a non-daily tool is hazardous...but I only learned it through experience. So, Pinboard will always be a great product to me, but I'm not going to put much energy into evangelizing for it :)
Yep, that, and the cloud access. Which, OK, I guess is now part of Google Chrome. But the tagging is a big deal...somewhere else in this thread, someone requested that there be machine-learning-powered auto-tagging...I thought there was? Because the pinboard bookmarklet frequently auto-tags articles for me, though maybe that's based off of a union between my existing tags and what other users have tagged that article? Anyway, it's nifty enough that it works fine for my purposes.
Also, there's an API...which I haven't used yet, but at least gives me assurance that I can mine/parse my bookmarks (which are at 1200+) in any way I please...but the default service has been good enough so far in organizing my info.
Comments
Was just about to go to bed but felt compelled to comment on this. Several years ago, or whenever Pinboard was a little less than $9, I signed up for it on a whim but kind of thought my coworker was crazy...except for content sites (i.e. Spotify and Netflix)...paying for an online service just seemed alien, and paying for a bookmarking service, a feature that has been functional in browsers for a long while...that seemed completely bonkers (I never got into delicio.us or its competitors). The only reason I can possibly think of for having joined was that my co-worker is much smarter and more efficient than I am.
Today, Pinboard is to me the epitome of a life/work-enhancing product...I use it daily to capture HN links, it's incredibly unintrusive, and not once since I've been on it has it been down when I've needed to refer to my bookmarks. I keep forgetting that I've already paid a one-time fee for it, and if it decided to secretly charge me on a reoccurring basis, I probably wouldn't notice and might not even care.
I don't think it's coincidence that my fondness of Pinboard correlates with how I've changed as a developer, becoming much less interested in do-it-all frameworks such as Rails, and aspiring to spend more time at the command line. I've had a much greater appreciation for simplicity, not because I'm particularly Zen, but because I don't want a service or a program or a framework to do everything for me. In the journalism/research world, people frequently discuss tips and advice on bookmarking apps. I keep pushing Pinboard.in but I don't think many people have been interested in it. Why would they pay for it when all it does is record bookmarks in plaintext, whereas Evernote saves so many different kinds of media, has an iPad app, and is free, even if it crashes once in awhile and can be unpredictable in how it saves content, etc. etc...but hey, it seems like a real product, right?
I just shake my head. It took me a few years of pain to realize that even the slightest bit of friction prevents a tool from being used daily...and when your job depends on quick, efficient information retrieval, a non-daily tool is hazardous...but I only learned it through experience. So, Pinboard will always be a great product to me, but I'm not going to put much energy into evangelizing for it :)
"and paying for a bookmarking service, a feature that has been functional in browsers for a long while...that seemed completely bonkers"
Can you explain why you now think Pinboard is better than the native bookmarking features in every browser?
I'm not OP but tagging and search are the big ones for me. It's like comparing Outlook Express with Gmail or M2.
Yep, that, and the cloud access. Which, OK, I guess is now part of Google Chrome. But the tagging is a big deal...somewhere else in this thread, someone requested that there be machine-learning-powered auto-tagging...I thought there was? Because the pinboard bookmarklet frequently auto-tags articles for me, though maybe that's based off of a union between my existing tags and what other users have tagged that article? Anyway, it's nifty enough that it works fine for my purposes.
Also, there's an API...which I haven't used yet, but at least gives me assurance that I can mine/parse my bookmarks (which are at 1200+) in any way I please...but the default service has been good enough so far in organizing my info.