Pinboard is a bookmarking service that allows you to easily save, tag, annotate, share, and archive bookmarks independent of your browser. Pinboard describes itself as “antisocial bookmarking,” which highlights its capabilities as a private and personal archiving tool compared to the social features offered by Yahoo’s Delicious service. I find Pinboard a simple, fast, and reliable way for me to save bookmarks and archive web pages for future reference. I have been happily using the service for nearly five months (Update a year) and recommend it highly.
Pinboard has become a part of my everyday online reading experience as I use it archive both a bookmark and the full text of any article I found interesting or that I plan to read later. My primary use of Pinboard is as a personal archive rather than a public bookmark sharing service, and I prefer it to Yahoo’s Delicious bookmarking service, although Pinboard has fewer options for sharing and tag management. For example, it does not support the Delicious style of aggregating multiple tags in tag bundles or the ability to share a bookmark with a specific user.
To start using the service, simply drag one of the Pinboard bookmarklets into your browser bookmark bar. The first style of bookmarklet can either open a new page or a popup window allows you to edit the URL, title, description, tags, and optionally mark the bookmark as private or “to read”. I use the send style of bookmarklet that Pinboard calls “read later.” This bookmarklet saves the page, automatically marks it as read later, and returns you to the place on the page where you left off without opening a new window or a popup. The “to read” status allows you to quickly build up a reading list without interrupting your workflow.
You can aggregate links posted to multiple services by configuring Pinboard to watch for links in your Twitter posts, Twitter favorites, or pages saved to Instapaper, Read It Later, Delicious, and Google Reader. You can easily save links from a BlackBerry or iPhone using a private email address from Pinboard. I find the ability to centralize my bookmarks from multiple services very convenient. Pinboard automatically expands any shortened links and stores the original URL. Full text search on Pinboard include the title, description, tags, and notes, but not the text contained in the pages themselves. Pinboard also allows you to narrow the results of queries with public vs. private status, starred status, and the source e.g. Twitter.
Pinboard offers a single paid add-on, that will archive the entire page, HTML, CSS, and images for each bookmark you save. You can then view the snapshot of the page, even if the original disappears. The cost for this is $25 a year minus your original sign-up price. Pinboard recently introduced a feature where all users can download an offline copy of the last 25 URLs saved. The developer says that he plans to eventually allow users to download their entire archive.
Pinboard offers multiple ways to import and export data including including a format compatible with that is compatible with Delicious. Pinboard offers both public and private RSS feeds of bookmark data including tag-based feeds. The Pinboard API is compatible with the Delicious API. This means that any application that uses the Delicious API should work with Pinboard by simply changing the URL to the API endpoint. Unfortunately, most bookmarking applications do not allow end users to change the API endpoint URL and few directly support Pinboard. On the Mac, both Delibar ($18) and Pukka ($17) desktop applications support Pinboard. The best solution for mobile devices is to use the Mobile web version of Pinboard. Update The Delibar touch application for the iPhone and iPad ($1.99) works with both Pinboard and Delicious. I recommend it.
Overall, Pinboard is an excellent option for storing and archiving bookmarks and I recommend it highly. The service is not free. Currently the price to join is $6.38 (Update $7.41) and the cost increases by a fraction of a cent for each new user. I like this pricing model as it is inexpensive and allows the developer to support the service without ads and without taking external funding. This leaves the service with a smaller, but more active user-base, and more importantly almost no spam. Recent Pinboard releases have improved bulk editing capabilities, but it is not currently possible to add or remove tags on a set of items returned from a search of your own bookmarks. Hopefully, the developers will eventually add this feature as it would make it possible to quickly and easily organize large numbers of uncategorized bookmarks. Update The developers added this functionality. Tag management is now far more flexible.
If the idea of social bookmarking seems foreign or the benefits do not seem clear, I highly recommend taking three minutes to watch the short and entertaining animated video Social Bookmarking in Plain English by Common Craft. What is Antisocial Bookmarking? is a nice post on the Pinboard blog by, Maciej Ceglowski, the founder of Pinboard explaining his reasons for creating the service.
* This article originally appeared as Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Bookmarking Service in my Messaging News “On Message Column.”
Update 2010-12-16 Mentioned feature additions, Delibar touch support, and price update.