Pinterest Secret Boards: Too little, too late.

UPDATE FOR CLIPBOARD USERS: The service has been acquired by Salesforce.com and will be discontinued from 30th June 2013. Sadface. There's a "what to do now" spiel here, which will take you through the process of preserving and exporting your clips.

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Pinterest has finally launched secret boards, a feature that allows users to create private collections of images they bookmark through the service. Previously, every board you created on Pinterest was public by default, which was a right pain in the hoop if you wanted to use it to plan, y'know, surprise things that you didn't want the world and its granny to know about before the event.

While Pinterest appeared to dither long and hard about whether they'd bother their arses to offer users the one thing they've been crying out for since its launch, I looked elsewhere for my private planning needs. I tried Evernote but missed the visual interface; I tried MikeLike and was delighted that it looked so like Pinterest but missed the mixed media note-taking options that Evernote provided, where I could save my own notes alongside bookmarked links, text, and images.

I try to keep my digital life reasonably streamlined, so although I could have used a combination of Pinterest for public/social sharing, MikeLike for private planning, and Evernote for personal bookmarking, I really wanted to find a single service that could combine the best of all three.

Clipboard, I think, is it.

{some of my Clipboard clips}

{some of my Clipboard boards}

The visual interface means that it looks very Pinterest, but the whole thing is rather more versatile: clips from the Internet can take the form of images, text, or entire pages, you can add and save your own typed notes, and while there is an option to make clips and boards public they're private by default.

I find that I'm less inclined to fall down the rabbit hole of browsing other people's bookmarks on Clipboard than on Pinterest because where Pinterest is all about the pretty, Clipboard feels more like a place to get organised and get things done. 

Anything that helps me to not procrastinate my time away is a winner in my book.

I also like that you Clipboard allows you to create additional boards on the fly by simply adding new hashtags to the clip that's being saved (Pinterest requires that you set up new boards on the site before pinning to them.)

Where Pinterest currently limits secret boards to three per user, there are no such restrictions with Clipboard. Additionally, with Clipboard you can flip-flop between clips being private and public ad infinitum; with Pinterest, it's not possible to make any of your existing boards private, and if you choose to make a secret board public and then change your mind, well, tough. There's no undo.

I'm using both services side-by-side at the moment because it would simply be way too time-consuming to go back through more than a year's worth of stuff on Pinterest and shuffle it across. Pinterest will need to do a lot more than offer three secret boards solely for images to tempt me back full-time, though, and I just wish I'd found Clipboard before I amassed almost 1,500 bookmarks on Pinterest.

PS - this is not a sponsored post, and I've received no payment or perks for writing it. I came across Clipboard while searching for Pinterest alternatives, and it's just impressed me so much that I wanted to tell you about it.