Clipmarks

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

~ the obit ~

the bookmark tool i actually used was Delicious, the one with the dots in the name, everyone's messy public pile of links. Clipmarks was the American cousin i never installed. it did something slightly different and slightly cleverer, and it is the sort of small, smart tool the web used to be full of before the big platforms swallowed the idea whole.

the trick with Clipmarks was that it did not save the whole page. it let you grab a piece of one, a paragraph, or the single useful photo in a wall of text, and keep or share just that fragment. this was around 2005, years before Evernote's web clipper or Pocket made saving-a-piece-of-the-web a thing you did without thinking. it had a browser button and a social feed of other people's clips, the Delicious idea aimed at fragments instead of whole URLs.

and then it did the thing a lot of clever small tools did in that era. it got bought, and passed around, and slowly dissolved. Forbes acquired it in November 2007, no price announced, and folded it toward a sharing product called Amplify. for a few years it hung on as a feature of something bigger. in early 2012 a venture-backed newcomer called Clipboard scooped up both Clipmarks and Amplify, and the old service was switched off, its clips migrated somewhere else or just gone.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what got buried with it ~

the idea outlived the product by a mile. clipping a snippet instead of a whole page, keeping the one part that mattered, is now built into every read-it-later app and every browser's share menu, and nobody thinks of it as a feature anymore. Clipmarks was early to it and got no credit, which is the usual fate of the small tool that was right too soon. i was not one of its users. i just recognize the shape of what it was reaching for, because i use the descendants of it every week.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is that being bought was the cause of death, not the rescue it looked like. Forbes folded it into a bigger product in 2007. Clipboard swallowed that in 2012 and switched it off, and Salesforce swallowed Clipboard the year after and shut that too. each buyer was a little bigger and each acquisition a little more fatal. a tool that survived on its own from 2005 got absorbed to death in the span it took the acquirers to lose interest. sometimes the kindest thing that can happen to a small product is to never be wanted.

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