Review: Pinboard.in

Pinboard.in is a social bookmarking site by Maciej Cegłowski.  Here’s a few things you might like about it:

• The interface is incredibly simple and clean
• Your huge Delicious library will import quickly without hassle
• It has handy bulk processing features
• It has bookmarklets that work like Delicious
• Gmail-like starred status, and a read later flag
• Amazon S3 backups (with some Ma.gnolia mockery)
• At a time when Microsoft and Yahoo! are working together, people are looking for serious Delicious alternatives

One big thing that’s unique about Pinboard is this: there’s a one-time signup fee.  It’s currently $4.99, and this will scale up as more people join the site.  This inspired Cegłowski to dub the site an ”anti-social bookmarking service”.

Imports

If you read this blog you probably already use a social bookmarking service, so the first thing you’ll do is import your bookmarks.  Pinboard does this efficiently, firing off a background task that imports items as you use the site.

It retained my Delicious metadata: private bookmarks are still private, tags all appear present and correct.

Design

The interface is inspired by old-skool Delicious, but has its own identity too.  It’s unobtrusive and easy to understand.

I think people will like the starred and to read flags.  Although tags would do the same job, these flags are much less hassle.  Stars are actually used for bulk editing.  Viewing starred items (from the top-right navigation) displays a bulk operations box.  This makes it easy to tag a set of items, or toggle their starred/to read status.

Bookmarklets

The main “popup” bookmarklet has the same layout as Delicious:

Which is actually nice if you’ve been using Delicious for a few years.

The Fee

I don’t know if the fee is a viable business model, and the developer cites it as a way to cut down spammers and people gaming the site.  He’s been careful to select one of the easiest possible payment methods — Amazon — so it won’t put people off.

However, with some grass-roots marketing and enough blog reviews, the developer could easily attract 10,000 signups (I’m speaking from my own experiences of launching commercial web apps here).  That would keep him hacking on Pinboard for a year.

I think the ability to gift the service to friends would work well, but that might be against the developer’s anti-social philosophy.