

SalesForce.com acquires Clipboard, plans to shut it down. - kellegous
http://blog.clipboard.com/2013/05/09/Farewell

======
Zikes
Launching an online bookmarking service seems like a pretty stable retirement
plan nowadays.

~~~
dreadsword
Well, it makes sense: no one has come up with the magic formula to deal with
the over abundance of information available today. (Disclaimer: see my
submissions for my own ongoing attempt).

~~~
jcrites
One of the core features I've wanted from a bookmarking service was the
capability to store the actual /content/ of the bookmark indefinitely. I want
to recall having read an article or paper years later in conversation, say
"Let me find the citation for you", and then actually follow up! And still
have the original content even if the URL was taken offline, which happens an
unfortunate amount.

Luckily, Pinboard (pinboard.in) has this capability, including full text
search, with an archival account ($25/yr). As does Evernote, but I find
Evernote a bit heavy weight for solely bookmarks. (Note: Pinboard is not
Pinterest.)

I save hundreds of bookmarks per month - basically everything interesting that
I read and might want to reference later. I reference my bookmarks less than I
had expected, but I'm still happy and getting definite value from it.

To be honest, my ideal bookmarking system would record and index literally
/every/ website I ever visit. Then I don't need to take any action and can't
accidentally fail to find something I viewed before. I've considered
implementing this scheme for myself but have not yet followed through, since
Pinboard works pretty well, and is easy to activate using a bookmark.

My one complaint about Pinboard is that I found it difficult to obtain
support. I contacted them through their advertised support channel about a
problem I initially encountered during the signup process, and never heard
back.

~~~
comex
I used to use Furl for the content-saving feature. Its eventual shutdown has
made me wary of any bookmarking or other archival service that I can't host
myself.

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gexla
Great service, worked well, looked good, team of developers, everything free.

It seemed this thing was headed for acquisition from the start.

I'm done using these sorts of services. If it doesn't run within my Emacs /
Vim / Unix workflow then I won't bother, or I will build it myself.

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cpursley
There's nothing wrong with selling to the right suitor but completely shutting
down the product?

Is anybody building a company for the long-haul these days, or has the home
flipping bubble just moved over to the startup world?

We need to start a trend / honor system for startups to sign so users know
they won't be shafted down the road.

I'm going to start a startup that has some standard legal docs that says you
won't shut the company/product down even if acquired (disregarding business
failure). You get a quality-mark type badge for your site.

~~~
famousactress
Honestly, I doubt almost any of the aqui-hire deals happened because the team
didn't care about or want the product to work out. I assume this is more often
a soft-landing for failure.. companies that aren't working out, finding their
model, or gaining enough traction.. so the team ends up taking a signing bonus
to jump somewhere together.

Is there much evidence people are really starting shops just to prove their
team is worth hiring?

Another note: a reasonable sign that you're at risk of getting 'shafted' as a
user is that the company is relatively new, definitely not profitable, and
you're not paying for the product.

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pajju
I admired their innovative way of clipping, DOM manipulation, one of the best
engineering teams of our time! Well, this must be a team-hire.

Pinterest did pinning with just images, these guys did for grabbing any web
content! Amazing. A great blogger tool. But once you start grabbing web
content it starts to look like a bookmarking service. That's were they headed
to.

I would have paid them an yearly subscription. And I don't like to bookmark
URL's, rather save interesting tit-bits of web-content to my Board. ( grab
those useful HN comments and add to my Clipboard)

Clipboard could have emerged as content-grabbing, content-management with
collaboration, had they rolled out some paid-service model. They never even
tried to speak to their users!

Founders need to be accountable for such drastic shutdowns. And if such
shutdown's happen often, don't users lose trust? Users kinda lose confidence
to invest their energy and time on early-starup products. Right?

~~~
grakic
I was sad about the shutdown, calling stupid names and all that. But then I
tried the export feature and it is great. Now I have complete offline copy of
all my clips.

~~~
plyleung
Clipboard's great for clipping all sorts of things from pictures to articles
and text. If you use Clipboard primarily for saving text and are looking for a
replacement, you might be interested in a website called QuoteRed
(<http://www.quotered.com>) which I built with a friend.

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siculars
I consulted for Clipboard very early on. Gary Flake is a really smart,
talented and drive engineer. I'm glad he got a chance to see this through.
Sorry it didn't gain the kind of traction I'm sure the team was looking for. I
hope some of their tech can be worked into the salesforce stack and will
continue to live.

~~~
simplekoala
Bro/Sis, your <http://siculars.posterous.com> link is out-of-date. What is
your new home on web?

~~~
siculars
posthaven!

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sachinag
The point is the domain name, gals and guys.

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pajju
can you elaborate? what is in there with this domain name for salesforce?

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pilgrim689
Salesforce.com has some ridiculous domain names: work.com, data.com,
force.com, do.com, database.com, desk.com, social.com, etc. I've never seen a
corporation go after so many and so generic domain names... I'm assuming GP
just meant that "clipboard.com" is yet another trophy domain name on their
shelf.

~~~
sachinag
Well, they'll certainly use it. They didn't just shut down Rypple. They
renamed it Work.com, which is a much much much better name.

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jmboling
Did they really just sign their shut-down notice with the words 'peace out'? I
don't know why im surprised. Those two words sum up quite compactly the
i-tell-myself-and-my-customers-i-give-a-shit-about-them-and-my-product-but-
when-it-comes-down-to-it-i-honestly-could-care-less-ness that seems so
prevalent in startup culture right now. What happened to genuinely giving a
shit? I could actually summon a degree of respect for their decision if they
had at least been real enough about it and added 'suckers' to the very end.

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edwardbch
damn! now what I'm I supposed to do now with all of my cooking recipes?

Seriously, I think I will go back to the old school word document for storing
stuff, you can't trust services like this to last. Does anyone have a
recommendation of a paid alternative that won't close?

~~~
simplekoala
Evernote?

~~~
edwardbch
Seems like the winner. I used it years ago but wasn't as complete as it looks
right now, will give it another shot.

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DigitalSea
Bookmarking services are the new stock market it would seem. Feels like there
have been numerous acquisitions and shutdowns of bookmarking services in the
last 12 months. A good talent acquisition on Saleforce's part in the form of
Gary Flake. He's regarded as one of the best engineers in the industry, he's
really smart and will no doubt bring a lot of value to Salesforce.

I understand a lot of people are frustrated, but at the end of the day, you're
using a free service and to be honest not many start-ups are in it for the
long-haul. Clipboard never quite got the traction it deserved.

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stmchn
This is a bummer but I admire how they've handled the acquisition. I was an
avid user of Punchfork until its acquisition and was bummed with the way they
handled user data (More info here:
<https://github.com/fictivekin/openrecipes#the-story>)

I'm really glad they're giving users complete control to acquire their data
and, even better, that they're encouraging developers to use their data and
import it into other tools.

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simplekoala
Any guesses on the acquisition price and/or windfall per employee?

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tzury
I really love using clipboard.

If SalesForce has some "forces" in it, they shall simply let a small team of 1
or 2 people to just maintain it.

Or at least, opensource it.

~~~
crabasa
Unlikely. SFDC acquired Seattle-based Thinkfuse last year, who had a great
product that people LOVED, and shut it down:

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/25/salesforce-acquires-
techsta...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/25/salesforce-acquires-techstars-
and-techcrunch-disrupt-alum-thinkfuse/)

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samfisher83
What is the point of aquire and shutting down. Is it just for employees?

If you offered the employees more money they would work for you. Why payoff
the VCs?

~~~
phillmv
Yes, but calling it an "acqui-hire" probably makes it look less good.

>Why payoff the VCs?

Because they're probably interested in the executive/founding team, and they
can't leave without placating their investors. Wouldn't be surprised if the
employees got shafted/walked away with a mild bonus.

As far as I can tell, this sort of thing basically acts as a shareholder
wealth redistribution scheme to people who have demonstrated social proof.

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sriramk
One key bit here is Gary Flake, the founder/CEO of Clipboard is a industry
legend and is a key hire (I believe he's going to become VP of Engg at
Salesforce). If a talent acquisition, Salesforce is getting great talent.

~~~
dmbaggett
He's also a super-nice guy and went to grad school at U Maryland -- go terps!

~~~
simplekoala
Amen to that

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dreadsword
How as clipboard differentiated from Pinterest? From what I can see, the
difference is that it archives whatever you've clipped. Is there a proprietary
technology element to this that has value for Salesforce?

~~~
rhizome
How about that it's already built?

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dreadsword
They're shutting it down, and AFAIK storage of information parsed from web
pages isn't particularly proprietary.

~~~
simplekoala
Going on one limb here - The vision of Clipboard per Gary William Flake (who
is an awesome guy, btw) was laid out while he was working on similar ideas at
Microsoft. There were already a few prototypes which I am sure, Microsoft
(patent generating machine) would have patented. So, either Clipboard folks
have filed a ton of patents as Gary continued to pursue relevant ideas at
Clipboard, and are sitting on valuable IP, and SalesForce is buying IP + Gary
+ Team or just Gary + Team. Acquisition price would be higher in the former
scenario (not sure by how much % though)

