As far as I'm concerned, Pinboard is the most reasonably managed digital product I pay for. No feature creep, no bloat, no overthinking it.
While Maciej notes accurately that death comes for us all, he's already outlasted the theoretically more powerful competitor that was Delicious.
I would say "I'm excited to see what's next for Pinboard," but I suspect the future is all it needs to be: The service will continue to function as designed, and that's all I really need.
I love Pinboard the way I love no other digital product I’ve ever owned or interacted with. If anyone wants to take lessons for the future of what digital products could and should be, they should learn their lessons from Pinboard. It’s a delightful and wonderful service.
I love that you don't randomly fuck with the UI I've already learned for shits & giggles. I'm not saying it's perfect; just I've already learned to do my work and now I want to pay attention to other things.
I despise how the idiots at google and apple can't live without randomly permuting the android, gsuite, ios, and macos UIs all the time.
There is a pending android 9 update on my phone, and ios 12 on my ipad. Not today, Satan, not today!
This has been discussed around here - if you have permanent UX staff, what are they going to do to justify their existence and how do they get promotions? They have to change things.
I think you can switch “UX staff” for anyone who works with developing the product, rather than maintaining it as it is. What is a developer going to do if the product is already done?
The question becomes - why do you have so many extraneous staff that they start making changes for the sake of change? If it doesn't result in growth, it's time to prune those people.maybe switch to consultants instead.
This is an interesting observation. I worked for Google for a number of years, and while the UX staff was light, our (relatively) small product did have dedicated staff.
That being said, Google's org is pretty fluid, there should be plenty of new projects in need of UX that you don't have to mess with old projects.
I wanna know who the UX people are on Youtube. I never understand what is the point of half the changes and have started to dislike the mobile app enough to actively avoid browsing for videos
Doesn't help that the recommender algorithm seems to surface completely random 8 year old videos in the "recommended" feed now
I haven't used Pinboard but you're damn right about this. Is like the supermarket, one day you find chocolates in one isle next week chocolates are in a completely different isle only that messing around with the UI infuriates users.
>Is like the supermarket, one day you find chocolates in one isle next week chocolates are in a completely different isle only
The supermarkets do that because it increases sales. While your hunting around you will see other products and between old chocolate location and new choclate location will be some products that people often purchase with choclate.
You might be annoyed but you will more likely give them more revenue. I wonder if the same is true 2ith ux design?
I love the stable UI too, because I've applied my own custom CSS to it, and written a userscript to give myself some extra functionality I want, like some highlighted tags in the popup window, and it never breaks.
Even without any tweaks, it works, and that's way more important than being pretty (to Pinboard's userbase of nerds at least). Usually UI refreshes come with features being broken or dropped altogether.
For what it’s worth, iOS 12 didn’t change that much. The main focus was performance, especially on older hardware.
The most visible change might be notifications, which are grouped by app and added a convenient option to revoke something’s notification privileges without digging through Settings.
First, you rid yourself of the Google Overlord that is tracking any and all input from its user — You! On a more serious note, Pinboard can be incorporated into so many different services, even his competitors. Do you use Instapaper? Pinboard will sync everything you saved so you don’t have to worry about losing it after reading it. Same with Pocket. Or it’ll automatically grab embedded links from Twitter posts you “liked.” He makes it easy for you in import all of your Google bookmarks if you export them to HTML.
His API is a modified version of Delicious.
You have a built in Notes path that can also store (x) amount of notes.
Your account is as public or private you want it to be. You can make all bookmarks and user page private by default, or you can alter which tags you want to be public, etc. Best of all, nobody is tracking you. You can be an invisible user with a backlog of bookmarks spanning years and you will always have access to them.
Quick disclaimer: I’ve been using Pinboard since 2013-2014, before the new subscription model, and am fortunate enough to have paid an onetime-fee.
The huge thing, and the reason it is worth paying for, is that it archives bookmarks automatically. Not archiving the bookmark itself, but a searchable archive of the page contents itself. This is great for bookmarking random dev blogs or documentation that I come across, if I even suspect I've searched for an issue before my first port of call is pinboard, since I can often find the exact page that solved the problem last time. Or, in the cases where the original site is offline or the page contents have changed.
I gladly pay the 25/year, the only software product I was ever happier paying for was sublime text.
I think, and someone correct me if i’m wrong, that the $25/yr sub is mostly to enable archiving, which gives you full-text search through all of your bookmarks.
You can search by tag or URL on a standard account.
Pinboard is great if you use multiple different browsers on multiple different devices and want to be able to quickly access any bookmark anywhere. Or in an environment where you don't want to sync all of your bookmarks but you still want access. I also really like the tagging feature which I believe Chrome does not offer. The read / unread toggle is nice too.
Agreed!! It's a no-nonsense service that just works. I use it everyday but don't have to think about it or relearn it as the years go by. I love it for what it is and am excited for the next 10 years.
I do love Pinboard as well, but I would really like to see it continue iterating.
There are some very useful features that would be great additions to the product though. Things like better Firefox integration, more powerful querying (e.g., it's not possible to search "unread starred bookmarks tagged with hn" today), and the open API being feature equivalent to the website to name a few.
While Maciej notes accurately that death comes for us all, he's already outlasted the theoretically more powerful competitor that was Delicious.
I would say "I'm excited to see what's next for Pinboard," but I suspect the future is all it needs to be: The service will continue to function as designed, and that's all I really need.