I wonder how much this has to do with the rise of Pocket over the last year.
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.
Instapaper is nice because I felt like I was paying a reasonable amount for an app that I use regularly.
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 don't understand why people care so much about the "longevity" of an app that at most saves their data for a week, like Pocket, or something like Google's Keep, a notes app.
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 don't understand why people care so much about the "longevity" of an app that at most saves their data for a week, like Pocket, or something like Google's Keep, a notes app.
I have thousands of items in Pocket going back a year and a half.
And I have hundreds of "important" bookmarks in Chrome that I'll probably never check again.
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.
>And I have hundreds of "important" bookmarks in Chrome that I'll probably never check again.
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.
if you have unread items going back for more than a year, chances are you are adding more to the list than you are removing. I guess hes right, i have observed this in myself and many colleagues from the days of delicious onwards. You bookmark/tag alot of interesting stuff because you are absolutely sure you will need it again and then forgetting about it after several weeks/months never looking at it again.
In the case that you need that knowledge again, you just dig it up on google (if you can remember it).
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.
>If you have unread items going back for more than a year, chances are you are adding more to the list than you are removing.
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've done this in Instapaper. I have many thousands of articles (thanks to the instaright Firefox extension) going back years. Clearly, this is what Clay Shirky says is a filter problem, not a problem of too much information. I no longer horde in instapaper like I used to but I would like to at least be able to be able to export what I have since I started using it and even transfer the FULL archive to pocket. Probably doesn't apply to many, but: "If you have more than 2,000 articles, only the most recent 2,000 will be included. " I not only bought Instapaper, but I've been a paid subscriber since the beginning (so I can search my archive for potential research) and it would be nice to download a full archive, but nope, I can't.
I think OP's saying he has read archives going back 1 year and a half. Not unread, read.
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?
>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].
I only read when I'm on holidays. I also keep warm clothes around even though I won't need them for another 6 months :) There are many ways to enjoy "slow IT".
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).
This is absolutely right. We are drowning in an tidal wave of books/articles to read, videos to watch, podcasts to listen to etc. Trying to keep up is a fools' errand we must admit to sooner or later. The best we can do is give in and hope to drink a few sips from this ocean.
>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.
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.
I'm guessing that Pocket means to be acquired eventually.
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.
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.
Even paying apps go for for a sale, less often though. For me Pocket is so seamlessly integrated with my online presence that it will of course to see it go(considering acquisition will kill it or somehow make it unusable - ad etc) but the ease/swiftness makes to very hard to switch to any other service paying or non-paying.
One example is their Android focus which, sometimes I funnily think, developers like Marco despise(no, read ignore :P ).
Instapaper's Android app, while not done by Arment himself, is probably the most pleasing non-Google Android app that I've used. He may not care about the platform, but he didn't push a poor Android product.
Indeed. Many companies are hesitant to fully activate their advertising apparatus, and go years without making revenues (eg. Tumblr). I worry when I see a company that isn't attempting to accrue meaningful revenues.
I'm actually quite happy when I see that companies begin serving ads substantially.
Speaking of Pocket, I'm baffled by their lack of (recently upgraded to simply lacking) sharing functionality and full-text search.
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 actually signed up for Kippt when initially searching for a Pocket alternative and there's a lot to like about it.
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.
Kippster, a 3rd party app, has been pretty great for me on iPad.
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".
> Passing a Pocket link to someone without a Pocket account leads to a sign-up page.
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.
Seems like it makes a lot of sense to do this. They don't want to become a de-facto mirror for the content, they want to provide it only to people who are actually their users. I'd rather have that, along with a bias towards sharing the original link, than a lot of sharing of the reflowed content.
>They don't want to become a de-facto mirror for the content, they want to provide it only to people who are actually their users.
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.
The analysis on his part had to be simple. He has two products right now, one of which generates $2.40 one time and then people use it for years. His second product pays him $1.40 per customer every month. The second product is far more stable long term.
I have no particular loyalty to Instapaper, but their major feature over Pocket, for me, is sending a compilation to kindle as an ebook (Kindle sees it as a magazine, complete with TOC.) People have been asking for this feature from Pocket for a while now (http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/questions/286894-k...), but without much encouragement that it will appear.
I think Instapaper for iPhone is more polished and minimal compared to the new Pocket and that's why I like it. However, the web version is extremely trouble and useless and needs some work.
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.
It absolutely had something to do with it. I don't think anyone would say that Instapaper is 4x better than Pocket ($3.99 vs Free). If anything Pocket has clearly made a name for itself with better design and its new Pocket for Publishers API. I think Instapaper saw its peak about 6 month - 1 year ago and with The Magazine doing well, it was smart of Marco to sell it off in my opinion.
I tried Pocket and couldn't get past not having article length indicator, the quick archive/delete menu, favorites, and the Kindle auto-digest. Has the situation improved in any of those areas?
There is one simple thing that prevents me from using Pocket: pagination. It does’t work, it’s fiddly, it’s unclear how to turn it on, when you manage to activate it it switches off with the tiniest gesture. Pagination is the big Instapaper feature for me.
i could be wrong, but isn't pagination just swiping to the right to activate it? and then to deactivate it, you would just scroll the content normally.
The thing which irritates me most about this pagination model where you swipe, is that if there is a code reference or something off page, it means u wrestle with this page flipping on/off until you finally are able to drag the page so u can see remainder of code listing.
I would have done the same as Marco. It was unasked for and unnecessary. Pocket is a great app but so its Instapaper and Marco has done a tremendous job over the years by keeping it in shape by himself (with exception of the Android app). This is a way on pissing all over the the efforts of a independent developer. Just because.
It wasn't directed at Marco. There actually were [1] tweets prior to this one where Instapaper users talked about switching to Pocket because of the news. Marketing to people using competing products is everyday business.
No, it's a royal dick move to announce it right when the competitor just switch hands, especially in this case when your competitor happens to be -up to this moment- an independent guy that has done this project for years on his own.
The service is not being terminated, that info has been posted for a long time... so again, unnecessary and unasked for. That's all.
No, it's a royal dick move to announce it right when the competitor just switch hands [sic]
Really? This is an interesting post on what is ostensibly a website about entrepreneurship, especially one that constantly discusses customer acquisition.
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.
That doesn't mean its not a dick move. Especially considering the way it was phrased.
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.
He's stated before he likes the employee-free lifestyle. And there is a huge gap to bridge between "I can do this myself" and "There's enough work to hire a full-time employee".
But getting one or more partners on board who get like 10% of the revenue and take over all the development work and day to day business might have worked quite well. Or subcontracting to some kick-ass freelancers (who would have jumped at that opportunity, surely?).
The amount of work is, I suspect, not a factor. Im not sure that having an employee wouldn't be a move I'd ever want. Yes, that means I'll never pass a certain level of success by the measure the majority use (money). However if that's the price, so be it.
The other complication is that Instapaper is in a weird place in its lifecycle. It's got lots of paid users, but they paid years ago, and now they are just a drag on making any kind of meaningful changes. Investing a lot of money to improve the app probably wouldn't pay off.
I enjoyed the podcast that Marco had on the 5by5 network because he seemed like such a regular guy who happens to work hard and put out a popular product. A lot of times it also motivated me to get to work on my own things. Congrats to him and Im looking forward to what he does next
Has there been some sort of falling out between Arment, Siracusa and Gruber - they all left 5by5 within a short time of the Gruber move, and in my opinion their shows are now worse.
I think for the two recent guys that left, they were just burned out on having to carry all the content of a weekly show alone. Now their new podcast is more of a conversation and they can just BS without much prep.
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.
Nicely referenced. I just noted that Siracusa and Marco seemed to start shows very soon after leaving and despite saying things about probably coming back they haven't.
I switched from Instapaper to Readability about a year ago, despite Instapaper being faster and having a better (actual) business model. I was lured by the beautiful reading experience that comes with Readability’s iOS apps.
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.
The odd thing is that he already hired an editor for The Magazine so it's not like be needs to work full time on it.
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.
Actually, it doesn't sound odd in the slightest if you read the whole thread, including the two people at the end complaining about the lack of support. Reading the article, it sounds like Instapaper was just too big for Marco to support on his own, and has partnered with BetaWorks to help him make the product better, probably by giving it support.
It seems incredibly cut and dry from that perspective.
Well, one of bottom guys is the editor of Arment's magazine, so only one of them is asking for support. I just find it odd that people saying things mostly proven by this sale (Instapaper isn't Arment's top priority, it is hard to run Instapaper alone) gets a somewhat chastising response saying "it isn't true at all".
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?
I think the thought process is simple - you run a paid service and it's good, liked by people and you see another service, free, being acquired(acquihired most likely) and you feel bad about it(not jealousy necessarily) and you give your opinion and how that's bad for app ecysystem and of course for the users who depend on them. But when an opportunity comes to selling the app you just sell it if the price is good and that's a known thing.
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.
Good for Marco, good for Instapaper, good for Betaworks.
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.
I’m saddened by this announcement. I’m an early Instapaper paying subscriber, a The Magazine paying subscriber of the first hour, I’ve read every article on his blog, I’ve listened to all the episodes of Build & Analyze, Accidental Tech and the Neutral podcasts — I’ve spread the word every way I could and engaged with the sponsors of the shows. I became a Tumblr member because of 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.
Creating a service shouldn't be a lifetime commitment to running it. There needs to be a way for Marco to continue inventing new products without dedicating an increasing percentage of his time to supporting existing ones, and this seems like a reasonable way to allow that.
How does Loren Brichter moving to Facebook affect Letterpress in any way? Are you worried you'll now be getting pop-ups asking you to "like the word XYLOPHONE on Facebook"?
What are you worried about? Both Loren and Marco are independent developers who need to put food on the table. At some point you need to make sustainable decisions; sometimes that means leaving VC-funded companies, and sometimes that means joining them or selling to them.
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.
Hope they don't remove the epub download option. Everybody's building iPhone apps, but last time I checked only Instapaper supported epubs. It's been great with my kobo reader*
For at least year Instapaper wasn't really moving forward. Design feels outdated, the website looks like thrash. Pocket on the other hand looks and feels pretty awsome. As you can the fact you paid for the app or not has nothing to do with this outcome so far.
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.
I'm hoping that when Marco says "I've sold a majority stake" he doesn't mean "I've sold everything". I'm a big Instapaper fan, and I'd hate to see someone else take over deciding the direction the service should move in.
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've been hoping for innovation in the app for a while now. It'd be nice to have any sorts of options or filters to help you clear your backlog, such as "filter by shortest to longest" or "show all half read articles".
Hopefully this deal helps innovating an app that has become a bit stale.
wondering if betaworks will just use the parser technology to use it for other products like the "RSS reader" DIGG announced or s.th. else.
Maybe they are trying to build something like www.dotdotdot.me
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.