The next generation of Instapaper
marco.org
marco.org
It's no secret that Pocket has improved dramatically since rebranding a year ago. And I'm sure most people who are looking for their first "read-later" app are trying Pocket (free) before buying Instapaper ($5).
Personally speaking, I bought Instapaper for myself and gifted it to a few other people over the years, but I switched to Pocket a few months ago. The continuous updates and simpler interface (those thumbnail pics are surprisingly useful) won me over, despite my hesitations about their business model.
Pocket, although having its own benefits, is free. Any service with ongoing costs (parsing servers) that charges nothing for their app has me questioning their longevity.
I'm actually quite happy when I see that companies begin serving ads substantially.
Prior to the name change, Pocket offered a $3 "Pro" version.
I'm guessing that Pocket means to be acquired eventually.
Pulse runs a free app parsing/serving from App Engine and took in $9.8M in funding before being acquired by LinkedIn for $90M.
Pocket runs a free app parsing/serving from EC2 and has taken in $7.5M in funding.
I was able to see who would be interested in Pulse and why pretty early on. I'm not sure about the same for Pocket.
And those acquisitions work out so well for the product, especially smaller, more niche products.
If they've taken that much money, they are going to have to provide a strategy to monetize. If they are doing it for free, it means they are selling analytics about what you are reading to somebody else.
For myself, I'll pay for the app.
One example is their Android focus which, sometimes I funnily think, developers like Marco despise(no, read ignore :P ).
Unless the developer has committed to not selling your data, they probably are already doing it.
I had invested time in Spool, and when they got acquired by Facebook, all I got was a bookmark list in a mail attachment and no more service. No readable article, no offline video, etc.
Who cares if it dies in 2 years? You might be switching through 3 other alternatives by then anyway. And you can still save your week worth of data if they announce the shut down anyway.
It's not like say an e-mail service, where you might actually want to keep your years worth of data.
I have thousands of items in Pocket going back a year and a half.
Let's face it, if you aren't reading it in the first week, you probably never will - except maybe that one article you plan on reading when you're travelling a few weeks from now. But even then you might forget all about it, with all the news coming it.
That's a pretty terrible analogy.
What I have in Pocket is more than a bunch of bookmarks, it's a local archive of everything I've added. I can read it in a nice flowing text format and benefit from limited search functionality. I can reference anything in there anytime whether I have connectivity or not, whether the source page still exists or not.
>Let's face it, if you aren't reading it in the first week, you probably never will - except maybe that one article you plan on reading when you're travelling a few weeks from now.
Stop projecting your habits and use case onto everyone else.
Might not be true for you, but i am sure its pretty common behaviour. I have given up on read-later apps because stuff just kept piling up. Noawadays i just leave the tabs open until i have read something of interest and if i figure that it isnt interesting enough after a few days i just close the tab and forget about it. That way i am managing my to-read list on a daily basis and it doesnt go back later than a week. With chrome sync its also easy to grab the open tabs on my other devices and read them there.
That being said things might be different if i had a long communte or had more freetime after work, but in that case i am usually reading a book, if i am reading anything at all. Giving the brain some relaxation time from the constant bombardment of tech "news" is nice as well.
I too have hundreds of read articles sitting in my Instapaper's archives, and a few dozens of favorites. I'm more concerned for them than the unread articles.
If Pocket goes away in the blink of an eye, what becomes of your archives & favorites?
Seems like the type of thing to be proactive about it.
Pocket has an API that you could use to sync with another similar service , or roll something of your own. They also have a simple export which provides a list of source URLs for what you've pocketed.
I've set Kippt up to retrieve from Pocket and used to the manual export to load things into historious [1].
As a last resort, on the Android version all the offline assets and pages can be found here [2].
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5610492 2: com.ideashower.readitlater.pro/files/RIL_offline
I think you're missing the point and stuck in the use case of these tools as simple bookmarks or reading lists.
I have little reason to remove anything, ever. It's all being stored for free/negligible cost. I can reference it whenever and wherever I like.
>In the case that you need that knowledge again, you just dig it up on google (if you can remember it).
Right, I can search Google's index how ever many billion pages, hoping that what I want still exists online and that I can remember something specific enough about it to filter the specific needle I want out of the world's largest haystack.
Alternatively, I can just search the store described above which holds point in time copies of the relatively tiny subset of things I've actually seen or at least found interesting in the past. I can use utterly generic, half remember descriptions like "database" and get just a few matches rather than the 764,000,000 of Google.
>Might not be true for you, but i am sure its pretty common behaviour.
That's fine, I understand how people might choose to use these service differently than I do.
This tangent started with mtgx claiming an inability to understand why anyone would care about longevity or keep years of data in such tools.
I'm trying to help with that understanding.
That said, moving away from Instapaper was some grunt work but not too hard - I've opened every link in a tab and used hotkeys to add them to my new weapon of choice (Reading List).
Passing a Pocket link to someone without a Pocket account leads to a sign-up page. If the recipient already has an account or goes to the trouble to sign up, they're redirected to their own queue, not the linked article. If the recipient goes to the trouble to sign up and pocket the same page themselves they will end up successfully accessing the getpocket.com/a/read/XXXXXXXXX URL that they were original sent.
Pocket is throwing away potential new users who quit at the sign up page and useful information about how existing users share.
Within the last month, they finally added some sharing functionality, but it sends links to the original not the pocket version. Another opportunity to pull new users into a test drive of the product being thrown away.
Lack of full-text search makes referencing anything down the road incredibly difficult. I've ended up regularly importing my Pocket queue to historious [1] to achieve this.
At this point, the only thing that keeps me using Pocket is the very nice Android app.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I just tried sharing something from the Pocket Android app and it gave me the original URL in the Gmail message I opened.
That probably has something to do with failing to read what I wrote.
I'm talking about a link to the "read later" view. I even described the original URL functionality you're confusing it with.
"Within the last month, they finally added some sharing functionality, but it sends links to the original not the pocket version."
Surely there's a way that could be prevented while retaining the benefit of exposing potential new users to the service?
The current sharing feature sends 800 character URLs pointing to email.getpocket.com. I'd think something could be put into and parsed out of that monster string to prevent the mirror scenario.
Send the first X clicks to a reflowed version with with a non-invasive sign-up option, send the rest to a sign-up page sans reflow.
I didn't stick with it or sign up for pro for a couple of reasons.
Namely, lack of an app and what I find to be a "cluttered" experience.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but if I want to save the page I'm on (I know I can save a link directly with a right-click) to Kippt I hit the extension icon which prompts me for tags, a destination and requires an extra click to actually save. Contrast that with Pocket and historious where it's one click, done. Pocket actually does it best by temporarily presenting me with the option to add tags or go the list without insisting.
Now, if I want to search what I've saved on Kippt I head on over to kippt.com and I'm presented with something that (to me) resembles Outlook. I click into a little search field, type my search and hit enter. I wait, get results then click a link.
If the link came from Pocket, I get a largely empty page with yet another link to click to reach the actual content. (Links added directly to Kippt for later reading have a summary here, that's fine.)
Contrast that with historious. When I want to search what I've saved or imported from Pocket I head to historio.us and instantly it's Google for my stuff. I start typing and hit enter. My results appear immediately, if I want to go straight to source I hit the main link, if I want a reader view I hit mobilize below it, if I want to publish it on the public Google for my stuff at user.historio.us I hit publish.
As you can see, relative to that experience, Kippt requires "extra" steps for every common action I use.
I was an avid Pocket user. And it's great for saving things you want to read later and then just throw away.
A lot of these articles/videos I want to read later, then save for reference. With Kippt I can send pages to my Inbox exactly like I did with Pocket. Once I read them, if I want to save them for later, I can move them into any 1 of the categories I've set up. I have about 20 categories ranging from "App Store Articles" to "Analytics Videos" to "General Programming Learning".
I can't imagine how I would live without it now.
uhh… No it doesn't
Please read the whole post.
that work for you?
But when someone of my family or friends asked me to what should he use. I always says Pocket, because it is easy and not classy like Instapaper and don't forget the updates too.
Ex 1: https://twitter.com/SocialJerm/status/327547885308739584
The service is not being terminated, that info has been posted for a long time... so again, unnecessary and unasked for. That's all.
Really? This is an interesting post on what is ostensibly a website about entrepreneurship, especially one that constantly discusses customer acquisition.
It can be both a dick move AND a good boost for Pocket.
Hmm, last time I checked this is still business and it's a good tactical move to take your main competitor's customers/users when there's a good opportunity.
Again. I'm not saying that this is not something Pocket shouldn't do, just that in this case, and considering Marco's dedication to this, it's rude. But business is business, I get that.
Dick move and good-for-business moves aren't mutually exclusive.
I actually doubt it has much to do with Pocket, instead I think is exactly how Marco put it, grown bigger than a single person could manage.
Congrats to both Marco and Betaworks.
Good luck Marco!
For Gruber, I assume it was just money. Someone else offered him more or an ownership stake that he wasn't going to get from 5x5.
Siracusa and Arment both said they thought the shows had run the course. Siracusa is also a regular on The Incomparable [4].
[1]: http://5by5.tv/talkshow [2]: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical [3]: http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze [4]: http://5by5.tv/incomparable
Hopefully, with a focussed team behind it, Instapaper will begin to catch up on the design front. I’m looking forward to seeing where Betaworks take it.
He may be just refuting the "peak downloads/full time on Magazine" claim, but kind of an odd response given this.
It seems incredibly cut and dry from that perspective.
Maybe he has another idea for a new project. He has definitely "seen the light" about a product producing monthly revenues instead of a one time purchase price.
Instapaper has had multiple similar inquiries from large companies over the last few years. We’ve never gotten very far in talks because I don’t want Instapaper to shut down, I don’t want to move my family across the country, and they didn’t want to pay enough — for them, they’ll pay a premium to hire me, but they won’t pay much for a service they’ll shut down immediately and an app they’ll throw away.
I was only able to reject those offers because Instapaper is a healthy business, and the life that Instapaper provides for me and my family is better than what the big companies offered."
If you want to keep the software and services around that you enjoy, do what you can to make their businesses successful enough that it’s more attractive to keep running them than to be hired by a big tech company.
So it's not a "Talent acquisition", but how could we still keep the software and services around that us enjoy in the future?
OF course in the blog post after sell you mention how you'll still be influential and all.
Though not al sell/buys are bad. Evernote bought Skitch and now I like it more.
I believe Marco when he says he's not done it out of worry for the competition. He's never seemed particularly bothered about having rivals, as Instapaper was making money. It does seem that his passion for the project was waning though, there's not been a new version for a while, compared to a few years ago where new features were arriving on a reasonably regular basis.
I think it'll be a good fit, whilst Marco might be bored with the project he wasn't going to give his crowning achievement up to anyone, so I imagine Betaworks will be taking it onwards and upwards. Good for us as well, it means Marco can find a new project to interest him.
Marco has always talked about how important he felt it was to be independent and to offer a paid service in order not to be acquired. Given how he handled the Android release, I believed he would never sell Instapaper.
Last week, Loren Brichter announced he would be moving to Facebook. I’m still shell-shocked about that announcement as a very active Letterpress player, now this. I’m worried.
I will continue to pay for Marco’s products and services, but I am worried what will happen to Instapaper, which is an important tool for how I acquire information and do business.
They've demonstrated an ability to produce excellent work. They probably won't go away, and if they do, we get a new, strong voice for independent developers. We win either way.
Doesn't matter, I ended up liking Pocket better after having been a long time Instapaper user.
* albeit, I run a script to fix some errors (based on http://opennomad.com/content/instapaper-epub-issues)
Instapaper situation is the best example, that Marco's jabber that you should pay for apps if you wan't them to last is just plain wrong. The free vs paid doesn't really matter in long run. Fortunatlley you can switch from one to another within a week, so its not much of an investment anyway.
What he's "selling" are potential future customers, subscriber fees, and ads.
I don't know what the curve on user adoption looks like, but it seems like a smart choice from a financial point of view.
It'll be interesting how this fits into the upcoming Digg RSS reader.
A big part of Instapaper's success comes from the fact that Marco's done a great job at steering the ship. He really is a world-class product guy who knows what to say no to.
Congratulations to Marco and Betaworks. I hope it works out well for all of us.
I don't think it can be any clearer than this.
Hopefully this deal helps innovating an app that has become a bit stale.
I tease, I tease. In all seriousness, congrats to Marco. A real hero of The Internet.