Looks Like Pinterest, Takes On Evernote: Clipboard Launches Its Web Clipping Service To All
At first glance, you might mistake Clipboard, the impressively-backed web clipping service, for yet another Pinterest clone. But any similarities are only skin deep.
Context & Ripple Effects
Clipboard arrives into a market whose boundaries were drawn over the prior six months. In November 2011, Evernote pushed beyond note-taking with Clearly, its browser-based reader for the open web, signaling that saving and re-reading content had become its core battleground. Meanwhile Pinterest's run to 10 million monthly visitors by February 2012 made every grid-of-images interface read as a potential clone, which is exactly why Clipboard's backers needed it to look familiar at first glance while functioning differently.
The launch also lands mid-scrutiny for Pinterest itself: coverage through spring 2012 pressed the company on how it would make money — TechCrunch argued Pinterest was not 'playing dumb' about revenue — and raised unresolved copyright questions around republishing other people's images. Clipboard's opening move is to occupy the same save-the-web surface without the public-board model that generates those problems.
First-order effects
- Every web user deciding where to stash saved pages now has a well-funded alternative to Evernote, and Evernote must defend a capture workflow it had only recently extended with Clearly rather than owning by default.
- Clipboard inherits Pinterest's visual vocabulary without Pinterest's scale, so its immediate job is teaching users that clipping is private archiving, not public curation — a positioning fight fought in every writeup that compares the two.
Second-order effects
- Evernote's response options narrow toward deepening lock-in on its own terms — richer readers, better search across saves — because competing on interface novelty concedes ground to whoever looks more current.
- Pinterest faces a framing problem it did not create: if imitators keep launching with Pinterest-like fronts, advertisers and publishers evaluating the category must sort genuine curation audiences from lookalike products when allocating attention and spend.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward 'save for later' becoming a contested product layer in its own right, distinct from both bookmarking and social sharing — one where note-takers, clippers, and pinboards converge until someone defines the durable format.
- If capture tools multiply faster than any single winner emerges, the structural outcome is fragmentation of personal archives across services, raising switching costs and making export and interoperability the eventual regulatory and user-pressure flashpoint.
The trend: Personal web-capture is consolidating from scattered bookmarks into dedicated platforms, with note-takers like Evernote and visual curators like Pinterest each claiming the same save-the-web behavior from opposite directions.