Pinboard vs Delicious: there’s room for both

Techcrunch has a pretty strong line on Pinboard. The title of their review gives it away. If you want to know a bit more about Pinboard then take a look at Back To Basics: Ditch Delicious, Use Pinboard.

I’m not sure I agree. The value of social bookmarking sites is heavily rooted in the network effect. Otherwise, they’re not really social bookmarking sites, just online bookmarking. In delicious‘s case they still have a big enough crowd for a popular link to really mean something, and enough of a bookmark base to power a really slick suggestion engine.

Right now Pinboard doesn’t have either of those. That’s not to say it’s worth skipping over.

There’s no spammers (yet). It’s not a juicy enough target (yet), presently pagerank 0. The small entry fee is a deterrent to the people who would usually register dozens of accounts to make hundreds of bookmarks to their network of sites.

Delicious’s advantage of its huge user base powering its tag suggestion engine can be harnessed with a little help of greasemonkey. On the same day I registered I cobbled together a quick script that puts delicious tag suggestions into the pinboard bookmark popup. I’m sure eventually delicious will put a stop to it, but in a couple months I expect it to be moot, Pinboard will have the community necessary to power their tag suggestion engine.

Last but not least, the to-read feature of Pinboard is pretty slick. The Read It Later Firefox extension is very cool but I found it too heavy for what I wanted. I didn’t want to create yet another account. I didn’t want offline viewing mode, which ate up a lot of space on my university computer^[0]. I didn’t want

Pinboard’s toread is elegant. It’s a tag separate from other tags, so it won’t pollute the tag suggestion system.^[1] When I want to browse my reading list, I just click the “read later” bookmark. Simple. All I need to do is write up another greasemonkey script (or maybe a bookmarklet) that takes me to a random member of my reading list and I’m set.

Pinboard is simple and elegant but occasionally I’ll still go back to delicious for their popular page. If a resource makes it onto there it’s generally authorative. For my bookmarks I think I’ll stick to Pinboard for now.

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^[0] My university account only has 50 megabytes of quota, and I’d rather it be used by Lytero and code.
^[1] I never knew what to think of articles that people tagged ‘toread’. They bookmarked it ages ago, yet it still has ‘toread’ on it, did they never get around to it? Maybe it’s not worth reading? Maybe they didn’t bother to remove the tag? Maybe they’re lazy?