Clipboard

» see clipboard.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Thirteen months is how long Clipboard was open to the public. That is the first thing to know about it, and it is also why almost nobody outside American tech press has heard of it: the service came out of private beta on 31 May 2012 and was switched off on 30 June 2013. I was twenty-eight when it launched and had never heard the name until I went looking for things that died in 2013.

The person behind it is the reason it got attention at all. Gary Flake founded and ran Microsoft Live Labs, the group that produced Photosynth and Pivot, and before Microsoft he had headed Yahoo Research. He left in January 2011 to start Clipboard in Seattle with a thesis he kept repeating in interviews: that saving things is the fourth wave of the internet, arriving after search and after social.

Clipboard let you select part of a web page and keep it. The distinction it cared about was that the saved thing stayed alive. A clipped video still played and a clipped map still panned, because the service kept the markup rather than a picture of it. You organized what you kept into boards at clipboard.com/yourname/boards, and you decided per board whether anyone else could see it. Everyone compared it to Pinterest because of the grid. Flake kept saying the right comparison was Dropbox.

It reached about 140,000 users and more than three million clips, which is a respectable number for a five-person company and a small one for a consumer web product with that much press behind it. Salesforce announced the acquisition in early May 2013, reported at somewhere between ten and twenty million dollars and mostly cash, and the shutdown notice went up at the same time: clipboard.com will be discontinued on June 30, 2013.

~ the record ~

~ clipping something that still works ~

The technical bet was the interesting part and it has aged strangely. In 2012, keeping a live fragment of a page meant keeping its HTML and its assets and hoping the rest of the web held still around it. Clipboard did the work to make that mostly true, and the result felt like magic in a demo and like a maintenance problem forever after.

Everyone else in the category had already picked the easier side of that trade. Pinterest kept images, and Readability kept the text with the layout thrown away. Clipboard was trying to keep the thing itself, which is the most expensive promise in the category and the hardest to honor a decade later.

~ bought for the people ~

What Salesforce was buying was a Seattle engineering office with a Technical Fellow already running it. The staff moved across, Flake became VP of engineering there and later the company's CTO, and he left in 2016. The 140,000 accounts got a few weeks' notice to pull their clips out, and Archive Team recorded the outcome as lost.

This was the ordinary 2013 ending for a well-funded consumer web product that had not found its second million users, and the bookmarking category absorbed it over and over. Springpad made it to 2014. Delicious was handed between owners for years before anyone finally switched it off. Saving things kept turning out to be a feature of somebody else's browser.

~ the address has a tenant ~

clipboard.com answers today, with a working site and a company behind it. It belongs to a healthcare staffing business that matches nurses to open shifts, which has nothing to do with web clipping and presumably paid well for a one-word domain. The Archive Team page for the dead service has a screenshot of the homepage from 10 May 2013, taken five days after the acquisition news and seven weeks before the lights went out, with the boards still full of recipes and physics articles belonging to people who did not yet know.

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