Pinboard is Four Years Old

Today marks four years since I opened the creaky gates and started charging customers money for Pinboard.

Here are some site stats for this year, compared with one and two years ago:

* this is site downtime; API downtime was much worse, perhaps 48 hours in all

The site has continued to grow at a steady clip, adding as many bookmarks and tags this year as last year. Total revenue from signups and archiving has been far steadier than I expected from a web project, which by nature tends to be spiky. This comes as a considerable relief, since it means I don't have to hunt for a new brand of champagne or truffle oil every other month. The number of active users has found a steady state, with as many people joining the site as dropping off of it in any given month. Before growing the site much further, I would like to get better at handling support requests at this level.

It's been an active year behind the scenes. On top of the usual code gardening, I spent some time working to better secure the site, introducing API tokens for password-free authentication, moving everyone to TLS without breaking everything, and adding various cookie flags and HTTP headers to make the site a little more resilient to bad people in public places.

The major new features this year were tag bundles, privacy lock, major improvements to search, and the beginnings of a bulk tag editor.

I gave talks on Pinboard at Brooklyn Beta, CUSEC, and InfoShare Gdansk, and in the process got to meet Pinboard users in Osaka, Warsaw, Paris, Lyon, Stockholm, London and Berlin. This was an enormous amount of fun for me, and really helped to get me out of the house.

Finally, I made my first foray into venture capital with the Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud. The six winners have been hard at work, and I look forward to writing about what they've achieved in the coming weeks.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me with this project over the past four years, in big and small ways. July 9 is one of the happiest days of my year, and I owe it to all to kind people from across the Internet.

—maciej on July 09, 2013