This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers.
See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter.
Delicious, for all intents and purposes, WAS shut down, and a new, barely related site was put up in its place.
I was a Delicious user for years, with thousands of links tagged, and I continued using it for as long as I could stand under Avos, but the features that they cut and/or broke in the transition finally made me throw up my hands, give up, and switch...first to Trunk.ly, which Avos then bought and shut down (oops), and then to Pinboard.
I for one welcome my new Pinboard masters, especially if they're willing to fight to keep the service alive. :)
What exactly do you have against delicious' new interface ? I continue using it as I always did, and except for the design I barely see any difference.
1. I used the Delicious plug-in for Firefox. It no longer worked with the "social" part of social bookmarking: I got no suggestions when I clicked on a link.
2. The tagging was completely broken in the plug-in; the plug-in, unlike the new interface, still accepted spaces to separate tags. The new site considered EVERY set of tags to be one big unique tag, so several MONTHS of tagging had to be fixed by hand. There are TONS of complaints about this change, and Avos has ignored them all.
3. The secure RSS feeds were limited to 10 items. I use these as feeds for common links (news, comics, what have you) and several of my link folders were truncated by the arbitrary limit. They kept trying to fix this, but seemed to be incapable. When I realized I'd missed nearly a month of one of my favorite comics, I was quite annoyed.
4. Links were just lost several times; I would bookmark something, and two days later look for the bookmark and it would be gone.
I rarely went to the site, so the design changes were irrelevant to me. It looked like they were trying to make it into a Reddit or Digg or equivalent, though, and having the site move further in that direction and away from how I wanted to use it just seemed like a terrible idea.
But the core problem was that they broke their own API and the core functionality that caused me to want to be there to begin with.
Now in Pinboard I don't get to use the Delicious plug-in any more, but everything else Just Works. The site is clean and easy to use. Pinboard also offers an "archive everything" option that's awesome; so many old links eventually go bad, and having an archive of everything you care enough about to link is just cool.
They killed the 'network' feature, which was the only feature I used really. I didn't really use the bookmarking.
I used it as a kind of lo-fi Hacker News. I was following the bookmarks of a bunch of interesting people. It would aggregate all the bookmarks of the people I follow into one list.
I found that it was a great way to find interesting stuff on a variety of topics. It was a fantastic complement to HN, so I'm really bummed that they killed it. :-(
I'd love to see pinboard implement this (if they haven't already).
There is a lot of difference. They've basically killed the social bookmarking and moved more towards those funny-pics, funny-videos portals pointing towards different sies.
Slightly unrelated, but what you should say is visuals instead of "design". It would be pretty impossible for you to actually mean "design" and have your statement be sane.
the whole usability of tagging [completely unnecessarily] changed. their own bookmarklet (and functionality on their site) changed so that when you press the save button it saves right away, and then you have a option to add tags.
i'd find my self quickly adding and then having to find my link and editing it.
what is the benefit of these changes? why would you do that to all your users?
You see most of these services either have advertisements to bring home the much needed money to progress (see YouTube, Flickr) or are simply owned/backed by internet big shots which provide them visibility in the economy with these free services (Picasa, Delicious (until a while back)).
With still others, they have a business model based on paid and free services (see Skype and Grooveshark). The gaming sites, like Zynga, sell speed, better products; again some revenue model.
This is exactly the point the author wants to bring home. If somebody plans on providing a free web-service, you clone it, think of a business model (ads or user registration) and wait until you're the only one in business.
The article seems to be in response to the recent Gowalla acquisition. If Gowalla had been successful and still used, it may have continued on. Facebook isn't shutting it down because it was a free service. They're shutting it down because it's unpopular and unprofitable. To use the Gowalla acquisition as evidence that companies acquire other companies just to shut them down is silly. All it shows is that a company can be acquired even if they fail.
Not to nit-pick, but Facebook is not shutting anything down. They just hired the team, but did not acquire the users, IP, or really anything from Gowalla. Gowalla is shuttering Gowalla and joining Facebook. The fact that the founders are shuttering it and cashing out still proves your point, and I generally agree with it.
[the citation on this is an AllThingsD post - I just dont have it in front of me anymore]
It's unprofitable, at least in part, because it wasn't a paid service. If it was a profitable service then it's far more likely it would have been kept alive when bought out (or maybe not bought out at all).
"""This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers."""
No, it operates under the very correct assumption that paid services are MUCH LESS common to shut down.
(I shudder every f&%&^n time someone doesn't understand a generalization, and thinks that a few counter arguments disprove a statistical rule).
"""See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter."""
He is not saying that "free services are never carried on by their purchasers", he is saying that free services with no monetization model are in most cases not carried on by their purchasers.
Not familiar with all of them, but Flickr, Paypal and Skype, all have ways of making money and paid accounts. And Youtube has ads too (don't know about Picassa).
>No, it operates under the very correct assumption that paid services are MUCH LESS common to shut down.
Yep. Not to mention that, in paying for the service, you become the service's customer. The relationship with a free service is much murkier; instead, you are often its product, and the company has an incentive to manipulate you and breach your trust.
Flickr, YouTube, FeedBurner, etc. were obviously not charging enough money to sustain themselves. $25 a year vs free doesn't make that big a difference when costs are $100+/year per user.
I pulled the $100+/year cost per user figure out of my ass. It's probably much higher for Flickr.
I have it on good authority from people very close to the project that Flickr was never once in the black. Ditto for Skype.
Your whole comment, in fact, supports the idea that "if a startup loses more money than it brings in (whether it brings in $0 or $toolittle), it is extremely vulnerable to being bought and screwed over."
I don't presume that all free services disappear, nor that all paid services succeed. That said I'm very hesitant to make myself or my business reliant on any service with a business model I don't understand.
See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter.
As for the former, there's an unlimited number of examples (for a few, try http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/)
Unfortunately, $7/month from a few people can't keep things afloat.