YC-Backed Kippt, An “Evernote For The Web”, Lures Developers With New API, App Gallery

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Kippt, which lets you collect and share content from across the web, is looking to attract developers with a brand-new API and gallery of apps.

The two-person startup has relied on outside developers to have a mobile presence on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Kippt just returned to San Francisco from Helsinki, almost a year after graduating from Y Combinator’s summer batch.

“An API is not only good for us, but it’s good for our users,” said Karri Saarinen, who co-founded Kippt and leads design. “There are some companies that fear this kind of openness will somehow harm the company, but we feel it brings value.”

He pointed to more than a dozen third-party apps that bring Kippt to the iPhone or turn it into an elegant mobile reading list. Popular reading app Pocket added support for Kippt recently, too. Saarinen said that some developers have already organized hack days around the API.

It’s steady progress for the product, which started as a side project while Kippt’s other co-founder Jori Lallo was collaborating with Leah Culver on message board app Convore.

Over time, however, Kippt started to take on a life of its own. Like a more evolved version of early social bookmarking site Delicious, Kippt is a tool that lets people save and organize links into lists and share them with friends and work colleagues.

A recent redesign made the tool much more visual with image previews and a Pinterest-like layout for collections of links. Saarinen shies away from the word “bookmarking,” though. The idea with the recent redesign was to make saving links much more about the content rather than the URLs.

“People know what bookmarking is, but that they also have this preconceived idea of what it should do,” he said.

Kippt has a freemium revenue model: There’s a pro version for $25 a year that won’t have any advertising and will give people unlimited links.