

Ask HN: Would you pay to bookmark?  - sw1205

What would a bookmarking site need for you to part with cash?<p>Is there a big feature that a social bookmarking site could include that would encourage you to potentially pay a small fee to sign up?<p>Or, like Pinboard, is the ease of bookmarking, over any big features, the reason you may consider signing up to a bookmarking site?<p>thanks
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theprodigy
I'd pay for a list of bookmarks from various opinion leaders. If george soros
or andreesen bookmarked on a consistent basis content that they read or think
is important to read I would be interested in that. What would be good is if
they also included a short commentary of the importance.

The value to me is I can get a feel for what some of the most influential
people are interested in and what specific information they are using to shape
their opinions on various topics.

Twitter is some what like this, but there needs to be good consistent content.

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jayliew
That's actually a good idea. If people I follow & respect bookmarked, I would
consider paying for it since I am interested in their thought process.

Basically you want to follow their web "foot prints". On the flip side, that's
exactly what I use FriendFeed for (to leave my web footprints for anybody who
cares to follow), and that's already free. So the technology to follow someone
else's web trail already exist in many forms (delicious, FriendFeed), and they
are free.

So the question becomes: are the thought leaders using it and are they fine
with others following them (and will they be ok if those followers are
charged?)

It becomes a market problem, not a technology problem.

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jayliew
I'm biased, but entrepreneur to entrepreneur, here's my honest personal
opinion. I won't pay for bookmarking. It's too easy for me to cobble together
my own solution, and besides, there is already a lot of bookmarking apps that
are free.

I think there are certain things in life that the market is not willing to pay
for. Bookmarking may be one of them. On a related note, I'm looking around at
all the all the micropayment solutions out there on the web. Supposedly the
idea was that you can read a blog post, and if you like it so much, you can
tip a penny if you want. I haven't heard too much success in that regard ..
but I suspect that people aren't willing to pay. And as an entrepreneur, it's
tough to change the market (impossible?)

To be able to charge, your value proposition has to be not just incrementally,
but way waaaay significantly "above the rest" such that it's just such a
disadvantage for me _not_ to give you my money to use your product. Use
Delicious as your baseline. Delicious is free. So anything you offer that is
also offered by Delicious, you can't really charge for it. What do you offer
on top of that that is worth people opening up their wallets?

If so, I'd be interested to hear what you have.

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Jlloyd
I pay for instapaper and I pay for pinboard. I like viewing stuff later at my
conveniance and I just want to bookmark, easily, and not focus on the social
side but then I may be in the minority.

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doz
I would pay to be provided with a great service which combines many features
which you currently get with multiple sites. Personally don't see the point of
having local favourites in your browser if it can be done 'in the cloud', and
I don't really care that chrome for example can synchronise bookmarks across
multiple computers because I use multiple browsers.

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cmars232
No. In fact, lately I find its too much trouble even to bother logging into
delicious. I'll either star it or share it in Google Reader, or else I'll let
it go. If it really matters, I'll just search for it again. Guess I'm feeding
Google "the Big Pig" with all my habits, but I'm too lazy to care.

It'd be kind of interesting to more easily group links around some train of
thought (stuff I need for a baseline XP install, links related to some startup
idea, etc.) but I doubt I'd ever pay for it. I can use tags for this, but it's
always been kind of a pain to actually do it in delicious.

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anigbrowl
No. There might be some value in page discovery from cross-referencing with
other people's bookmarks (eg 'if you like Wired, you might also like this site
called HN') but that's what links and trackbacks are for. My experience is
that I'm more likely to be presented with stuff that is 90% irrelevant.

I honestly don't see any money in this...I think paid booksmarks are doomed to
failure in the same fashion that link farming and web rings turned out to be
dead ends.

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FreeRadical
I can't think of any such feature. With Google Chrome I can already organize
and search my bookmarks easily.

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sw1205
Would you pay for Pinboard? Say if you could also bookmark Spotify playlists
(as an example)?

