The relationship between Readability and Instapaper | Hacker News Reader

The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

marco.org

150 pointsduck54 comments

I'm totally confused by the apparent consensus sentiment going around on this. I adore Instapaper. I think it's unbelievably well done, I use it, and I don't have plans to look elsewhere.. that said, I can't say I worry or get sad about people who develop competing products.

Seriously?

It's ridiculous to react that way. First of all, I find it patronizing. Marco's really fucking good at what he does. If it turns out that what he does is easy enough for someone else to swoop in and do better easily, then what he does isn't all that interesting. I doubt that's the case.

Second... fucking of course. This is how it works, and how it's supposed to work. We're all consumers first, producers second. As consumers we benefit from this mechanism CONSTANTLY, and the things we consume are directly responsible for making the things we produce possible. We all got Facebook from Myspace from Friendster... Look at your car, look at your appliances, look at anything in your life. The ability to completely rip off shit and do part of it a little better is where much more innovation comes from than individual giant Big New Ideas. The folks that stay on top for prolonged periods of time are folks who capitalize on that are able to do that internally instead of resting on their laurels, and frankly Marco has proven that tendency as well.

[Edit] Sorry, further. The point isn't what Instapaper (as a product) is today, and this is exactly why small companies are great. It's what Marco is. When I go down the street and buy fresh pasta from the place that's been making it for longer than I've been alive, I'm not buying a product.. I'm investing in a relationship... A relationship that I can trust to deliver me compelling value on an ongoing basis. It's one thing to swoop in and build a product that looks very much like one that's on the market (only free, or whatever). That's not interesting to me. You haven't really accomplished anything valuable. In fact, it's easy to argue you've literally sucked value out of the world. It's another thing to replicate the ability to deserve people's trust that you'll continue to deliver value in new ways... even if the original source for your inspiration is gone (and especially if you were to blame for it).

TL/DR: I ain't scurred.

[Edit] Downvote explanation anyone?

I didn't down vote you and I do agree with most of what you've said regarding competition (I suspect the rest of HN also agrees).

What you didn't address though is Marco's past relationship with the founders. Specifically he says that he advised the founders, promoted Readability on his website and even created a white-labeled Instapaper version of Readability. Now they've created a direct competitor to Marco's app. This is generating the sentiment.

i down voted you because your comment was a little rambunctious and didn't really make a whole lot of sense.

Oh, well that's very fair. I'm kind of a handful.

    They are certainly a direct competitor to Instapaper 
    now. But it didn’t catch me by surprise, and I hope 
    to still remain friendly with them.

    This is a very big and increasingly crowded market, 
    and there’s no reason why we can’t respectfully 
    share it.

Those are inspiring words, which I will keep in mind. It is a very healthy approach toward competition and competitors, and I would rather adapt this one instead of "we shall smash our competitors to death" which is more in common (see all recent patent suites for instance)

It's not how things usually work out. Cisco and Juniper aren't friendly competitors. They are each trying as hard as possible to destroy the other. And the employees at each company feel the same. Less so at Cisco because they are so much larger, but at Juniper, they are absolutely focused on "kill Cisco."

well, I might be cynical, but do your really thinks he's 100% honest when saying that?

The reason I don't develop my ViewText any further is that the barrier to entry for this is just to low. Marco already has an excellent app, now reability will enter his market, along with Apple.

Here's an example: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marco.org%2...

ViewText is really good. If you have stopped development, why not dump the code to GitHub? Open source community could use a good text extractor as most of the current ones are pretty bad on server side and Readability's old code requires browser components to work well.

+1 for open sourcing it (from another ViewText user who also happened to need good open source text extractor).

BTW, what programming language you used for ViewText?

I'm always ashamed of my code.

You're clearly not ashamed of what your code can do, since you showed us the above with no hesitation. (And you shouldn't be, of course.) So why be ashamed of the code that accomplishes it?

Yep, function over form. And the function part is fantastic in this case

Slightly off-topic: Thanks for ViewText. Seriously. The barrier to entry may be low, but you are the one who developed it. It works flawlessly, it's fast, it's a delight to use on a mobile device and on the iPad, it doesn't attempt to distract me with ads or premium offers and it's free.

If you don't me asking, how much does it cost to run ViewText?

Thank you. It's about $60 a month to host all my sites. Including http://ihackernews.com and http://ronnie.me

You should create a tip jar. I use ViewText 3 or 4 times a day. If I go to a website and there's no print view or there's a load of crud I don't want to print I hit the bookmarklet and ViewText makes it all look good.

Sorry for derailing - is the text of the bookmarklet available somewhere so I can edit it into an iPhone bookmark?

javascript: (function () {window.location = 'http://viewtext.org/article?url= + encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);})()

I'm using Viewtext mainly to get the full posts from RSS-feeds into my reader, and it is excellent for that! It does not work on all the feeds I want to follow, but the majority is covered.

Maybe this is something you could focus more on if you feel that the Instapaper/readability-functionality is already too crowded?

That's not a bad idea. I might do that :)

how do you do that?

do you wrap the feed's url in viewtext's api url, and provide that to the reader?

ViewText accepts RSS feeds

Wow, I never new the creator of ViewText was on HN! You have NO IDEA how much your site has helped me, particularly on my crappy BlackBerry browser.

Thank you.

Yup! I created it for hacker news. While I was making http://ihackernews.com (HN for mobile), I wanted an easy way to view the text of articles, so I made VT.

I love Instapaper, but it's especially interesting that Marco has been able to compete against larger groups like Readability and Apple's Reading List. I'm afraid it might be inevitable that he gets swamped by a constant stream of competitive features, unless Instapaper expands beyond 1 employee.

But if it's just a 1 person company he can afford to stay small and still be highly profitable.

Additionally Readability has stated that they're still figuring out their business model, where as Marco has had a steady income for a long time now. It's entirely possible that Readability vanishes in a few years and Instapaper is still around.

Agreed. From a casual observer's perspective Readability seems to have failed at a good idea and is now switching direction with no clear goal.

Evernote, however, has a pretty clear business model.

What evidence do you see that being a one-man operation is hurting his business? As far as I can tell Instapaper is still leading the field in features and quality...

As far as Apple goes, I think Marco's predictions are correct. First, Apple will never compete on a feature by feature basis because that would add too much complexity, and they'll be constrained unless they make a native app. Second, Apple's reading list has made me realize how much I can benefit from instapaper's important features like offline reading and footnote handling.

edit: Here's Marco's original article about Apple's Reading list http://www.marco.org/2011/04/30/lion-safari-reading-list

I might be wrong, but isn't Instapaper is using the Readability's technology to process HTML and make it more readable? (http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs-readability/).

No, it uses a custom scraper written by Marco. I've found that both of them work better on some pages and worse on others.

(However, I do believe the "Safari Reader" feature of iOS 5 and Safari 5 does use Readability to extract the contents.)

The "Reader" button appears to be a fork of Readability (http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/08/think-safari-re...)

Also of note, the original Readability was actually "partly inspired by" instapaper (http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/02/readability/)

So I looked into all of these some time ago for an app that I use myself. The Safari fork of Readability is the best client implementation, while the best server-side implementation (by a mile) is Diffbot.

Out of the 50 sources I had (regular RSS updates, etc.) InstaPaper failed on far too many, either stripping important content or pictures and captions. Readability was only a bit better

I glued together an app that will pull in RSS, send each URL to diffbot, and then collate the output into a reader that I use. Never thought of releasing it as an app, I just use it myself.

Readability's code is a little bit old (2009), but seems no other better (opensource) alternatives...

And thanks for suggesting Diffbot, will try later.

C implementation and Python bindings, opensourced one hour ago https://github.com/fiam/readable

Maybe the name is generic enough, but I'm wondering if you're aware of Readable[1].

[1]: http://readable.tastefulwords.com/

Thanks for introducing me to Diffbot.

From your comment I expected it to be an open source implementation, but a high-quality SaaS with 50,000 API calls/mo on the free plan is still pretty damn good.

Offline reading and (more importantly) multiplatform support is going to keep me with Instapaper. The fact that I can get Instapaper articles to my Kindle is something that I know Apple is never going to offer. Ever. Now, if Apple offered an eInk Ereader that synced with Reading List (and offline support for Reading List) for less than $100 then maybe I'd jump ship.

In all honesty there would need to be a VERY compelling feature set at a low (free) price for Instapaper to lose me. I've already bought the iOS apps and incorporated the service into my flow.

wow, and this didn't even touch on Evernote's Clearly. Busy day in the 'easy mobile reading' space.

Which appears to be derived from Readable[1], based on how the reading view slides over the page and some comments in the extension's js files.

[1]: http://readable.tastefulwords.com/

Last time i use Readability it was too slow and stop using it. Original idea one was instant. So i use Readable most of the time. And sometimes i combine (Instapaper Text + Safari Read list). Speed is important, other features are secondary.

tl;dr: "Competition is good; It motivates me to keep my offering better"

There are in numerous Basecamp clones out there, yet a handful of them manage to do a percent of the revenues Basecamp does.

I guess it's weird that I often instapaper pages I've readability-ed?

I do the same thing, usually with multi-page articles, since Readability will stitch pages into one long one before I save to Instapaper.

Instapaper automagically stitches paginated articles together.

No, it doesn't.

http://www.marco.org/2011/07/19/siracusa-multipage

so it does. holy shit. i wonder how many articles I've only read a piece of because I thought Instapaper was stitching!

Exactly. It is a problem - I respect that Marco doesn't want to stich articles together, but I sometimes reach the end of an article to find myself unsure as to whether that really was the end, or just the end of page one. Would be useful to get some indication in Instapaper when this is the case. I am flirting with Readability for this reason.

One Chrome (and Safari) extension that I found helps is called Page One [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pojkjlgamiogkhagab...]. It will automatically redirect your browser to the single-page/print view for a number of popular sites (21 as of today).

after realizing that Instapaper doesn't do this I emailed Marco and then signed up for Readability. I've yet to decide if it's worth $60 a year for a Kindle digest, it probably isn't. I'll just send the articles one by one (ugh) and then throw them in a collection. oh well.

>In February of this year, the app was finished and ready to launch, but it was rejected by Apple for the in-app-purchase subscription-matching rule, which had just gone into effect. Readability decided that they didn’t want to give Apple the 30%, so the app was put on hold and soon cancelled once it was obvious that nobody was budging.

Readability didn't decide they didn't want to give 30%, they just couldn't because then Apple would end up with all of Readability's revenues.

I was firmly on Readability's side on that, but don't lose site of the fact that Readability set their own business model. They're willing to cut their take to 0% now, they just weren't willing to do it then. The difference being before content creators would have gotten 70%. Now they get 0. (For the general, publicized case).

Back in February they could have easily revised their own plan, to take 70% of net rather than gross, say.

A lot of imaginations among the announcements between Instapaper and Readability.

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