I try to keep a structured set of bookmarks to store the articles and pages I find on the web. But no matter how hard I try, I end up with an unwieldy collection of bookmark folders, sub-folders, and lists of webpages that are hard to manage.
A couple months ago, my friend Andrew told me about Pinboard, a simple, online bookmarking product. The mechanics that stood out to me were: 1) whenever you add a bookmark, you also take 2 seconds to add a few ‘tags’ that describe the contents of the page, and 2) you use search to quickly find the relevant tags / bookmarks.
There are people who have tens of thousands of bookmarks on Pinboard, and they love the product.
So I thought I’d give it a go, and I’m finding it great so far for $22 a year. Now, $22 a year may seem like a lot for a bookmarking service, but now we get to the real reason why Andrew told me about Pinboard.
Pinboard is built and maintained by one-man operation, Maciej Cegłowski. Via Pinboard, he’s making a point: that you don’t need VC money or a scale-at-all-costs approach to have a successful tech company.
He has users who love his product, he is contactable by email or on twitter for any of his customers to ask questions or suggest product ideas.
He’s built a different type of tech company. And I like it for both the service, and for what it stands for.