Pinboard

Yahoo want to sell the Delicious bookmarking service because it no longer makes business sense for them to own it.

Some of the people who have been scared by the uncertainty at Delicious have moved to the new Pinboard bookmarking service. It charges a fee to join. At the moment the charge is $9.05. The charge goes up as more people join [The fee is based on the formula (number of users * $0.001), so the earlier you join, the less you pay].

This pricing scheme will soon be abandoned since it would obviously limit growth.

I joined Pinboard for two reasons.

1. I am happy to support their business model. I don't expect everything on the internet to be free and am quite happy to pay a reasonable amount for a good service.
2. It Delicious does fold or fall into undesirable hands it might be hard to switch to Pinboard at that point. At the end of 2008 Delicious claimed it had 5.3 million users.  Pinboard recently said it had about 16,000 users. Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. It uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, and Amazon S3 for backups to. I doubt if it could rapidly scale up from tens of thousands of users to accommodate millions of Delicious refugees.

If you think you might eventually have to move from Delicious you might want to open a Pinboard account now.

Pinboard claim their entrance fee discourages spammers. They also claim to be spam free. That's fine but the fee also improves the quality [and value] of their usage data. Delicious suffered from spammers and spam dirties the usage data Yahoo used to feed into its search engine.  If Pinboard chose to sell their data it would be that much more valuable for being uncontaminated.

They don't disclose their business model but I would be surprised if it does not involve selling user data.