Pinboard

Pinboard

URL	pinboard.in
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Social bookmarking
Owner	Maciej Cegłowski
Created by	Maciej Cegłowski
Launched	July 2009
Alexa rank	15,328 (January 2012[update])[1]
Current status	Active

Pinboard (also called Pinboard.in) is a social bookmarking website developed and run by Maciej Cegłowski. It has a plain design and a focus on personal management of bookmarks using tags to organize them, similar to early versions of the Delicious social bookmarking service.^[2]

History

When Pinboard launched in July 2009, it charged an approximately $3 signup fee for new users.^[3] This fee is automatically increased by a fraction of a cent for each new user, a system intended to slow the growth of the site, to make enough money to sustain development, and to discourage spammers from joining.^[4] A few months later Cegłowski released an option to save ("archive") copies of bookmarked web pages with a $25 yearly subscription fee, and Pinboard became his full-time job with 1,200 users.^[5]

New users joined Pinboard at a gradual pace until December 2010, when information leaked from Yahoo! indicated an uncertain future for Delicious, which it had owned since 2005.^[6] Many people reacted by joining Pinboard; it grew to 16,000 users by the end of the month, with a signup fee incrementally increased to $9.^[6]

By October 2011, Pinboard had 25,000 registered users (including 18,000 active users) and continued to be a one-person company.^[7] Additional users joined Pinboard in September 2011 after Delicious was acquired by AVOS Systems and relaunched with less of a focus on personal bookmarking features.^[8]

Product

Cegłowski said that he created Pinboard "partly out of frustration with a redesign of Delicious that I felt removed a lot of utility from the site,"^[9] and the site includes Delicious-style bookmarking features with a personal list of tagged bookmarks and ways to edit and organize those bookmarks.^[10] Users can install a bookmarklet button in their web browser to add a Pinboard bookmark while visiting a website, and they can import bookmarks from Delicious and other services.^[11] Pinboard can automatically bookmark links from a user's Instapaper, Read It Later, and Twitter accounts.^[10] Pinboard also includes ways to view and subscribe to the public bookmarks of other users.^[11]

Pinboard requires a signup fee (with an option to request a refund within three days)^[11] and has a optional subscription fee for an archiving feature; the site does not have ads.^[12]

Cegłowski writes a Pinboard blog on topics including new features, site growth, the benefits of paying for services in general,^[8] technical aspects of running Pinboard, and critical commentary about social websites like Facebook.^[13] Cegłowski has discussed prioritizing speed and stability over using cutting-edge technologies for building Pinboard.^[9]

References

External links

• Official website