We are still in private beta but we'd love your feedback. Visitors from HN can access and register on our site directly at clipboard.com/register?token=hn. You can also reach us via email at support@clipboard.com.
There certainly are a lot of other bookmarking and web clipping services out there, but I'll tell you what I think makes Clipboard special.
1) Lightweight workflow - The bookmarklet is lightweight and easy to use. While I can easily annotate, tag or share my clip at creation time, I can also decide to skip all that and just save it with a single click. Personally, when I want to save something, I want that to be as frictionless as possible - I'll think about organizing it later.
2) Style - Clips preserve the style of the original content. Whether it's a facebook post, amazon product listing or tweet, your clips retain the look and feel of the original content. I find that to be really helpful when I'm scanning a page of clips - I can quickly recognize lots of pieces of content without reading any text.
3) Functionality - Lots of sites let you save a url or an image, but Clipboard clips are full HTML. This means links are active, flash embeds will play inline, text is fully indexed (which is very powerful for recall) etc...
4) Granularity of privacy - Clipboard makes it easy to save for yourself, share privately with one or a handful of people (via @ mentions), or publish clips to share them with the world. I think it's fair to say that most other services out there are heavily geared towards private or public without much middle ground.
You need an ipad client, thats where a lot of content consumption happens, especially long form.
One feature which i really like about Pocket, is it saves a parsed copy locally on the ipad.
So i can "save"/ clip a bunch of links/articles, i want to read & then i can read them later, even when i dont have internet access (e.g. on a tarin/metro)
Very impressed with the product. All the best.
Every corner I turn I sense the effort, thought and joy things were made with.
a question though, who produced your animation video? I am curious as we are also planning to produce an animation video for promotion for our product.
If I see a big page that tells me "first things first - you need to create your account" before I even know what this site is, you lost me. The next website is just a click away, or in this case, the closing of a tab away.
I've also tried the http://clipboard.com/site/news.ycombinator.com link another HN'er posted here, and I get an empty page. Oh, right, that must be because I'm using NoScript, but it would be nice if you had some kind of fall-back for such a case?
All that being said, I love sharing design samples with Clipboard when I am kicking off a project with a customer. It helps us scan the landscape and discuss the early plan. So it is useful for work, but I'd love if there was an easier way to collaborate. Or are there features I should be using differently?
@ followed by their fb &/ twitter username ?
OR their clipboard username ?
Here are some observations on sign-up and initial use:
Sign-up: Feedback for good field input shows check mark with FF 12 but missing font square for IE 8 and Chrome 21 dev.
Sign-up: Too soon to ask me to access my social accounts. We just met. No trust established. At least it's optional, though.
Sign-up: Bookmarklet installation guidance is slick.
Operation: Clipping via bookmark bar works very well. I like the subpage selection interface.
I'll have to play more to appreciate it all but wanted to get an initial reaction out for you. Nice job.
Also, glad you liked the bookmarklet installation nags. :)
- async => helpful async library https://github.com/caolan/async
- nodeinspector => node js debugging in a nice webkit UI https://github.com/dannycoates/node-inspector
- riakjs => for talking to Riak: http://riakjs.org/
- knox => S3 helper https://github.com/LearnBoost/knox
- optimist => helper lib for writing command line node apps (no more bash :) https://github.com/substack/node-optimist
- mocha => unit testing node code https://github.com/visionmedia/mocha
- emailjs => email helper https://github.com/eleith/emailjs
- uglifyjs => code minification https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS
Just a side thing, you sent me two emails: An email confirmation and a Welcome To Clipboard email. Would it be possible to join the two together, or forgo the latter? I'm just tired of getting so much email.
It looks really good. You seem to have the potential for the pinterest/delicious tagging stuff, but I don't know anything about that stuff. Another rant: when you delete a clip, it just deletes and displays the empty page, would be better if you went back to Home.
I wish you guys luck!
Regarding the welcome email and the confirmation email, we saw a hacker news post that shared we'd have better success when the confirmation email had a clear and actionable subject. http://clipboard.com/clip/LQiJMrYD7dhXX8DWhgOoKa8A2PHm_0fHaw...
Mobile - I often consume this kind of "clippable" content on a mobile device. It's limited in usefulness since it's just a browser extension (which doesn't exist on my Android)
Clipping UI - It can be frustrating to try and clip just the parts of a page that i want. The clipping box moves around seemingly randomly. I'd expect it to work similar to how a screenshot tool works, (a rectangular square on the screen) but it appears to be scanning for parts of the web page and then offering those parts as suggestions. This makes it difficult to just clip what I want.
Readability - On the "pinterest" board view (sorry - that's how I think of it) - the text is dramatically shrunk, and the headlines are often clipped. So I've got no idea what some of the clipped articles are about, unless I click them.
If there was a way to summarize the text instead of showing a thumbnail of the whole thing, it might be more useful. That technique (thumbnails) seems to work well on pics, but not on text oriented clips.
When I do click them, they appear in a lightbox view. The URL doesn't change unless I click through again to another view. It'd be good to have a linkable URL in lightbox views so I could share easier.
Nice work though, good luck with it. Also, I would love to hear more about developing your site in NodeJS .
Mobile - we've recognized the need for a mobile app so it's on the future roadmap
Clipping UI - we have heard mostly positive feedback on the rectangular clipping box. You could also use your mouse wheel to select desired portion of the page to clip. Of course, this feature is not very discoverable (yet) but it does make it very easy to clip.
Your points on enhancing readability for text clips and light box are spot on. We have heard similar feedback in usability study and we will see what we can do to address it while maintaining overall consistency and design of our product.
Thanks for your feedback.
Some UX suggestions: I sign up, and I said I wanted to follow music, programming, and tech, but I get to the Home page and I don't see any way to see others' content based on that subscription. Sure, I haven't clipped anything yet, but you already have the content at Public, so why not show me what you can do right away? Also, it's unclear that I need to click the Visit button to visit a post. Think of Reddit Enhancement Suite: it shows inline pictures, but if you click anywhere on the picture or on the link itself, it takes you to the original source. Here, clicking the picture does nothing.
That said, I like our logo and I think it makes sense in that the union of the heart and paperclip strongly relates to the act of saving. But I don't quite get the Charm logo; for me, it doesn't really connect to what I understand their product to be. In any case, it's all good.
Edit: There it goes, but it took a few seconds. Also, when I mashed the button four times, four "Email Address" boxes popped up: http://i.imgur.com/Y1s9q.png At least give me some indication that something's happening if you must delay like that.
Edit 2: Same thing happens when I "Submit" my email address, again with no indication that you got my address except for an unfriendly "Invitation already requested for....." message.
I'm on Luakit (which is just webkit, like chrome)
This is something I would like to share with the ~150 journalists I manage if it's any good.
Nice to see you guys here on hacker news!
Goodnight! (from the United Kingdom)
Clipboard finally looks like an end-all be-all for these types of services, but my problem with getting involved in yet another curation site is that I have these thousands of posts with their own tags already. Will there be any future efforts to allow the mass-upload / transfer of this content? I'd love to use the site but I can't pull myself away from two other dedicated services I've put years of effort into.
Edit: Actually, upon populating my feed and checking out the public posts, I'm not sure how this is any different from Snip.it and how the content is any better than the regurgitation on Pinterest or Piccsy. Also the layout is really busy and turned me away quite quickly.
Snip.it's primary feed is at least dictated by staff members who have gone through and vetted that the user's posts are substantial enough to warrant showing them on the front page as a means of proving quality. Much like I told the founders in the Piccsy thread, I think it is hard to launch a service like this when so many exist and your content looks the same and is equally unfulfilling. Piccsy's response was that users would do the legwork to enhance their experience, and my retort was that users don't want to bother doing all of this extra work when tomorrow another site like this will launch with higher quality content and a better layout. Thoughts?
This idea (or similar concept) was actually proposed to me my brother a few years ago, looks like you've executed it really well. I probably should have listened to him at the time!
One bug/missing feature: You don't seem to preserve custom fonts in the clippings - which means the formatting isn't quite preserved either.
Eg. Compare the full site, to the clips, at http://clipboard.com/home/openrent.co.uk.
It seems to me a Evernote-ish within your network. I'll keep using for a while and, in the case I come up with any feedback, I'll share with you guys.
Thanks for a bonus to HN users.
Also, I want to see what others who saved this web page also saved.
I really like the UI however, very attractive.
Huge plus points for the domain name, it's great.
