As much as I want to watch that YouTube video of Lady Gaga falling off her piano, I just don’t have time for it right this minute. Command-D works, but using Safari to collect links gets unwieldy fast, and relying on folders for organization feels very 1998. Alternatively, Pinboard keeps your bookmarks online, offers a handy mobile interface, and supports robust tagging for better organization.
Pinboard serves up bookmarks in a screamingly fast cruft-free interface.
Unlike all those other social bookmarking sites, Pinboard’s going to cost you. At press time, a basic Pinboard account was going for $9.33. The site follows a rather unconventional pricing strategy -- as more people sign up, the price increases. It’s both an encouragement to join up now and also insurance against the service growing too quickly and collapsing under its own weight. Pinboard’s tagline, “Social bookmarking for introverts,” indicates that the focus isn’t on sharing, but rather collecting links for your own use. You can add bookmarks via browser bookmarklets or email, and Pinboard can even integrate with Instapaper or Twitter to scoop up all the links you save with those services. Unlike the other guys, Pinboard lets you set all bookmarks as private by default. Thanks to the site’s clean design and focus on speed over whiz-bang features, saving bookmarks and browsing them is always super-fast. If you miss some of the social aspects of other bookmarking services, you can follow other users and browse popular links on Pinboard as well.
In addition to basic accounts, Pinboard offers Archive accounts for $25 a year. With archiving enabled, Pinboard will crawl sites as you bookmark them, downloading a complete copy of the page that you can reference later. You’re “limited” to archived pages of less than 32MB, but Pinboard’s developer points out that less than one in 1,000 bookmarks will bump up against that ceiling.
The bottom line. Pinboard is great at collecting bookmarks, but it’s built for lone wolves, not social butterflies.
Pinboard
Web browser, some bookmarks
Fast, clean design. Sign-up fee keeps out link spam. Global privacy controls.
No blog posting or sending links to other users.
