

Punchfork acquired by Pinterest - cardamomo
http://punchfork.com/pinterest

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paulitex
...5 minutes ago

"Paul, come look at this cool new recipe website. This is awesome. It's like a
really good recipe sharing site" - Sonia (she points to Punchfork on her
screen).

"Oh, I just saw on HN it got acquired by Pinterest." - me

"Wait what?" (Sonia reads the announcement) "'we will soon be retiring the
Punchfork site, API and mobile apps'..." What the? I just found this site and
now it's gone??"

"Yup." - me

Maybe congratz to the founders who got an early exit, but it seems like
another unfortunate case of users getting the short end of the stick.

Maybe we need better business models. Maybe Sonia would have paid $10/month
for Punchfork. Who knows. I paid for Sparrow, and that didn't seem to help.

Sigh.

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cardamomo
I rather liked Puchfork for its integration with DuckDuckGo and overall higher
quality of recipes (and better design!) than other recipe websites.
Unfortunately, I'm far less likely to go to Pinterest for my recipes now and
will probably just continue to search for recipes through DDG and have to sift
through the results by hand.

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curlypaul924
I agree. Punchfork is a really cool site. Pinterest has too much of a stigma
associated with it.

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cardamomo
For me it's less an issue of stigma and more a question of convenience. I use
DuckDuckGo for almost all of my searches anyway, and having quality content
from Punchfork integrated into my search results is much more convenient for
me personally than finding recipes through Pinterest.

...but I'm not a Pinterest user (yet), so I ought to curb my griping. When it
comes down to it, I can see the acquisition of Punchfork really benefiting
Pinterest users.

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po
Congratulations Jeff!

For certain categories of data, it's quite helpful to have a site that
scrapes, parses and collates it into a consistent format. This was Punchfork's
strength for recipes. Sounds like a good fit.

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earbitscom
Jeff is the man. Punchfork is one of the vegan/veg-friendliest recipe tools
I've used, and it's a gorgeous application. Excited to see what Jeff can make
of it with Pinterest's firepower behind him. Congrats!

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brianfryer
A huge congratulations to the founders! Getting acquired can be a great thing.

While I'm sad to see the site go the way of the dodo, I'm very excited to see
what sorts of things you'll bring to Pinterest. Perhaps I'll have an excuse to
actually use their service yet...

Cheers, and good luck!

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milkshakes
Congrats to Jeff, However, I will miss the punchfork recipe/ingredients API.

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gee_totes
Me too. Is there a timeline for when the API will be retired? Will it come
back in a different form?

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Tyrant505
Awesome news Jeff! Tasty!

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rgrieselhuber
Congrats Jeff!!

