About The Site

Pinboard is a fast bookmarking website for privacy-minded people. It helps you keep track of things you find online and manage your tab clutter.

The site is one of the oldest independently-run businesses on the web.

What does it do?

The site adds a small button to your browser that lets you remember things you read, giving you the chance to label them with tags and descriptive text.

Your collection is searchable, meaning that you can pipe a lot of stuff into Pinboard and be able to find it months or years later.

Here are some situations where Pinboard is useful:

  • >Do you keep dozens of tabs open and feel guilty about closing the ones you haven't had time to read?
  • Do you half-remember interesting things you saw online six months ago, but struggle to find them in a search engine?
  • Do you want to be able to search your Twitter links and favorites?
  • Do you read a lot of papers and PDFs and want to be able to search within them?
  • Do you participate in fandom and want a way to keep track of and share your favorite fic?
  • Do you find yourself collecting tons of links for a project or research paper you're working on, with no satisfying way to keep track of them?

These are situations where Pinboard is helpful.

You can also simply pipe in lots of stuff, read and unread, and rely on the search feature to find it later.

Privacy

Unlike other social websites, Pinboard is somewhat obsessive about user privacy. You can have an entirely private account visible only to you. You don't have to give your real name when you sign up. And there are no Facebook or Google tracking scripts (or tracking scripts of any kind) to worry about.

If you do want to share things with others, the tagging system makes it easy to find interesting links, and interesting people, sitewide. Pinboard users are an eclectic bunch, and there is always something new to discover.

No matter how you use the site, your data is never sold or shared with anyone else. And you can always export your data, even if your account expires for lack of payment.

Business Model

Users pay $22 a year for basic bookmarking, or $39 a year for archiving and full-text search. There are generous discounts if you sign up for multiple years.

This business model has allowed Pinboard to operate independently and successfully since 2009.

Design

Pinboard has a minimalist, information-dense design to help people get things done quickly. The emphasis is on speed and reliabilty, even on old computers or slow networks.

The philosophy of the site is that form should follow function, and that visual bloat and slowness have no place in a bookmarking tool.

History

I wrote Pinboard in the spring of 2009 as a personal project, partly out of frustration with a redesign of Delicious that I felt removed a lot of utility from the site, and partly because I had long wanted to have a bookmarking site that would archive my bookmarks. I invited volunteers to test the site in June of 2009, and started offering paid accounts in July.

The site stores several hundred million bookmarks, and has about 30,000 active users.

Technology

Pinboard runs on PHP and MySQl. There is nothing very interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!


For the curious, you can read more about the hardware behind the site (and other technical topics) on the Pinboard blog.

Contact

You can reach me by email at support@pinboard.in, or as Pinboard on Twitter.

Feature requests and general discussion are welcome at the Google discussion group.