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Instapaper is joining Pinterest
- protomyth 10y agoIts really not "joining" if you are cancelling a service as part of the announcement. What is so wrong with actually saying "we were acquired" and the new owner does not value some / all of our existing customers?
- jonknee 10y agoYou should read the post. > For you, the Instapaper end user and customer, nothing changes. The Instapaper team will be moving from betaworks in New York City to Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco, and we’ll continue to make Instapaper a great place to save and read articles. They are shutting down a developer product Instaparser that I don't think had much traction (first I've heard of it actually) and is less than six months old.
- protomyth 10y agoyou should read the post > As we focus on the future of the user experience, we’ll be sunsetting our developer product, Instaparser. Starting today, we will cease signups for Instaparser and halt billing for existing customers. In order to ensure a smooth transition for current users, we will keep Instaparser running until November 1, 2016. [edit: parent added another sentence after my reply]
- jonknee 10y agoYes, the API that no one uses and was announced in April. The product Instapaper that is in the headline and is what everyone knows about is not going anywhere.
- ihuman 10y ago[Edited to be deleted by user since I can't delete this]
- jonknee 10y agoIt was announced in April and is being shut down in August. Do the math.
- pc86 10y agoPedantry aside, if you're as big as Instapaper and you launch a product that 50 people use for side projects, you can safely say that nobody uses it.
- ihuman 10y ago[Edited to be deleted by user since I can't delete this]
- pc86 10y agoMy point was that in the broader scheme of things, a trivial number of people have even heard of Instaparser, let alone those who have heard about it, care about it, have signed up for an account, used it for anything beyond a side project, and are actually paying money for it.
- reitanqild 10y ago> you should read the post >> As we focus on the future of the user experience, we’ll be sunsetting our developer product, Instaparser. This seems to be about Instaparser, not the core product Instapaper?
- protomyth 10y agoAs I said, Pinterest has cancelled one product (Instaparser) as part of the acquisition which had some customers. They are currently keeping the main product (Instapaper), but we will have to see if that is a long term thing. Pinterest picked some customers to keep and some to cancel.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ihuman 10y ago[Edited to be deleted by user since I can't delete this]
- pc86 10y ago> we will keep Instaparser running until November 1, 2016.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- brians 10y agoBummer. I love and use instapaper, gathering articles for a few weeks to read at altitude. It's a great product, and I paid for a subscription these last years in the hopes that I could therefore continue to enjoy it. Now it's sold to Pinterest, one of the two sites I don't bother with links to—because I know Pinterest and Quora will require me to sign in rather than show me what they showed a search engine. What else operates in this space? Pocket, I remember. ReadItLater used to exist, maybe still? Does Pinboard do this somehow, maybe with an RSS reader? Or do I have to pay for Paperback?
- disposition2 10y agoWallabag (https://www.wallabag.org/ https://www.wallabag.org/) if you want self-hosted. Pinboard (https://pinboard.in https://pinboard.in) offers archiving for (I believe) $25 a year. Or Pocket (https://getpocket.com/ https://getpocket.com/) which used to be Read-It-Later.
- leejoramo 10y agoThanks for the link to Wallabag, I had never heard of it. Looks very interesting. I use Pinboard, and pay for the archiving option. I even periodically request a tarball of the archive for my own backup. Pinboard archives the entire page, not just a readable version of the content. For archival and reference purposes, I like this. It would be nice if Pinboard also provided a readable option. In fact, a number of the apps that work with Pinboard add support for readable versions. I will look into adding Wallabag into my workflow.
- idlewords 10y agoI'm cool with the idea of providing a readable option in Pinboard, since I already do something similar to get the text out of the page for indexing. Any library for this you particularly like?
- kough 10y agoReadability (https://github.com/luin/readability https://github.com/luin/readability) is a classic, and included as part of Firefox (I think, maybe that's been discontinued). It's essentially a bag of hand-written heuristics but they're pretty good heuristics. Some interesting reading is Christian Kohlschütter's thesis on this problem, which is framed in academia as "how do we assemble good text corpuses from webpages for data analysis, which means removing junk (boilerplate) from our HTML crawls" (https://code.google.com/archive/p/boilerpipe/wikis/WSDM2010Paper.wiki https://code.google.com/archive/p/boilerpipe/wikis/WSDM2010P...). Boilerpipe would probably be the right way to go, but if you're not using Java it could be harder to integrate.
- overcast 10y agoUp next. https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- Analemma_ 10y agoBased on your username, for a minute there I thought you might be Marco Arment, which would've made this comment even more hilariously cynical.
- rokhayakebe 10y agoAt least they are all consistent in their "excitement."
- adamnemecek 10y agoThis is offtopic but am I the only one who keeps confusing Pinterest and Pinboard?
- __derek__ 10y agoNo, and I think that's part of the joke for Pinboard.
- idlewords 10y agoIt's even better because in a bit of a dick move, they tried to buy pinboard.com back in 2009 or 2010. I say "dick move" because Pinboard predates Pinterest and they were aware of me.
- defen 10y agoDoes this mean they're now guilty of trademark infringement (Apple Computers vs Apple Records style) and you can take all their VC money? "Instapaper By Pinterest™" seems pretty similar to Pinboard.
- adamnemecek 10y agoThe only way to get back at them is to create Instatrest.
- tedmiston 10y agoYes, Pinboard with his massive legal team.
- chx 10y agoOdd. Pinboard (I am a subscriber -- hi!) is not on pinboard.com either.
- __derek__ 10y agoOh! I didn't realize that.
- fishtoaster 10y ago> The Instapaper team will be moving from betaworks in New York City to Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco I wonder how the instapaper team feels about that (and/or how much say they had in it).
- Analemma_ 10y agoThe "must be willing to relocate to San Francisco" meme now even applies to companies with no presence in San Francisco.
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoYep. LinkedIn now needs a pre-canned "No thanks, I'm not interested in moving to Silicon Valley" response.
- amyjess 10y agoAre people who choose to not participate in the move denied unemployment? Because that would really suck if you're loyal to where you live. Company has a "successful" exit, but you effectively get let go and denied unemployment.
- tedmiston 10y agoAccording to the CEO of Instapaper on Twitter today there are only 3 people. > Pinboard @Pinboard: I love the assumption that a small-scale bookmarking business has to lose money. Maybe don’t employ 32 people in a NYC office? > Brian Donohue @bthdonohue: @Pinboard there were three of us, Maciej. We weren't losing money. https://twitter.com/bthdonohue/status/768196096451416064 https://twitter.com/bthdonohue/status/768196096451416064
- bthdonohue 10y agoThe team was open to moving to SF as part of the acquisition. Also, there are only three of us so it wasn't as if many people were uprooted.
- elorant 10y agoSo what kind of value does Instapaper adds/will add to Pinterest? Will there be a pin it later functionality? I fail to see how Pinterest gains from such an acquisition.
- drizzzler 10y agoThey probably wanted the founder.
- harryh 10y agoThe founder (Marco Arment) sold Instapaper to Betaworks years ago.
- Veen 10y agoSeems fairly unlikely they'll get him.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mtmail 10y agoIt's say they wanted https://getpocket.com/ https://getpocket.com/, but with $14.5m funding it was too expensive.
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- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lsiebert 10y agoHmm... there are at least five possible acquisition benefits I can think of, beyond just the product and any specific product to product synergies. I'm speaking generally here, not about this specific acquisition. 1. Aquihiring may be cheaper then new hires overall, considering externalities. 2. The underlying tech may be useful. 3. The user base may be acquired. 4. the business relationships may be retained if they are beneficial. 5. Potentially less competition in a market.
- idlewords 10y agoAhahahahaha!
- Numberwang 10y agoMediocrity triumphs again!
- idlewords 10y agoAnd laziness! This kind of thing reinforces my worst instincts.
- kejaed 10y agoNow you can get support requests for instapaper too.
- Cenk 10y ago:(
- bishnu 10y agoWorth re-reading Marco Arment's blog post about selling Instapaper 3 years ago: https://marco.org/2013/04/25/instapaper-next-generation https://marco.org/2013/04/25/instapaper-next-generation "Instapaper needs a new home where it can be staffed and grown, but I didn’t want to give it to a big company that would probably just shut it down in six months." Oof.
- nuclear_eclipse 10y agoIn all fairness, it's been many times longer than six months.
- jonny_eh 10y agoIt wasn't shut down, it was sold to a big company. The six month clock starts now!
- TillE 10y agoHe "sold a majority stake", which means he still owned part of Instapaper. I assume Pinterest bought the whole thing and therefore gave Marco a large chunk of money? Nice for him.
- hkmurakami 10y agoThe value could have been less than what Marco sold it for originally.
- ihuman 10y agoEven in 2016 Marco is still selling things. Never change Marco, never change.
- S_A_P 10y agoPinstapaperist?
- grandalf 10y agoInstapaper is one of my favorite apps and I hope it doesn't change and that I can always access all my stored articles forever and ever.
- leejoramo 10y agoWhat do people use for the type of content extraction that the Instaparser API provides?
- mtmail 10y agoReadability, https://github.com/masukomi/ar90-readability https://github.com/masukomi/ar90-readability
- dmix 10y agoGood opportunity to build an OSS alternative? Or even a side-project... in the possible event Instapaper gets sidelined. That always seems to happen. With the exception of maybe Reddit.
- niftich 10y agoCan you summarize what their features are? From a quick web search, it seems to be: - Parsing a page for main body content, removing cruft, and reflowing it into an aesthetically pleasing layout - Cloud bookmarking these artifacts So how does this not run up against anti-scraping TOS provisions? Does money change hands between the publisher and the content-reflower?
- tjl 10y agoI know that traditionally Instapaper basically required you to load the page at least once first so you'd get all the ads then. But since then there's APIs that bookmark directly to it. My guess is that it isn't used enough for Web sites to bother. I view it as a specialized browser view, although the cloud bookmarking doesn't fit with that. I use Safari's reading view on pages all the time as they're too visually busy for the screen on my iPhone 5.
- joshuak 10y agoFor me the ability to have articles read to me on my phone while on the go is the key feature. I pay because of that feature alone, and would pay a LOT more to see general improvements in that direction. Without that it's just another in a long series of fresh buckets to put under the leaky pipe of bookmarks. Oh and... Fuck you Pinterest and the wedding planners you rode in on!
- tedmiston 10y agoFor the most part, it does not scrape around paywalls (though I have seen it work in some cases). I'm not sure how they pull that off, perhaps sending the source from the client instead of the URL and re-rendering it on the server.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
- jwr 10y agoWell, they didn't use the word "journey", which is a plus. But I'm worried. I find that increasingly my interests do not align with the interests of large companies looking for quick growth and large-scale "monetization". I would like to see more sustainable business models, where the goal isn't mad growth and sale to a larger entity, but long-term steady business.
- ryanmarsh 10y agoI use Instapaper to highlight research sources from the web. Then export my notes to markdown using the iOS app. I hope to God they don't ruin Instapaper. I really need it.
- Philipp__ 10y agoSad panda. I had amazing time with this app. Now I have to find alternative that will work well on iOS and macOS. :(
- ryanmarsh 10y agoInstapaper to me is the epitome of doing something that "doesn't scale", and yet it did.
- bthdonohue 10y agoHi all, Brian from Instapaper here. There seem to be a number of comments expressing concerns about the acquisition, and I wanted to just jump in and offer to answer any questions you have about the acquisition. Based on the comments I've read below the main concerns seem to be that Instapaper will either be shutdown or materially changed in a way that effects the end-user experience. I can tell you that neither of those are the plan for the short-term or long-term of the product, and I am personally looking forward to providing you with the same great service under a new owner. Brian Donohue Instapaper CEO
- overcast 10y agoWhile we all would like to remain optimistic, the reality of the situation, is that Instapaper will eventually be wound down. Likely within the next year. The "our incredible journey" speech has become a meme in itself. With that said, thanks for taking the time to respond, and congratulations on the acquisition.
- idlewords 10y agoDelighted competitor here. How do you force your entire staff to relocate across the country without "materially changing the end-user experience"?
- bthdonohue 10y agoHi Maciej, 2/3 of the staff members are moving to San Francisco. We all agreed to it before making the decision, no hands were forced. Also, big fan of your writing. Want to grab a coffee or beer now that I'm in SF? Brian
- dopamean 10y agoIf it's really going to be run as a separate property why does the team need to move to SF?
- dexterdog 10y agoBecause it's not.
- d_theorist 10y agoIs anybody else mildly annoyed by this trend of announcing acquisitions as 'x is joining y'? What's wrong with saying that y has bought x?
- exolymph 10y agoDon't they imply slightly different things? To me "joining" says merging teams and product goals, whereas "bought" could mean the smaller entity will still be freestanding.
- d_theorist 10y agoPerhaps. To me it sounds like a bit of a weasely and vague term. But of course different people use words differently.
- tedmiston 10y ago"Joining" makes it ambiguous whether "y has bought x" or "x was sold to y". It also seems to be used sometimes as a mask for acquihires (but I don't think that applies here).
- corobo 10y agoThe cynic in me is seeing it as an ass cover - "The product you like is joining us" vs "The product you like has sold out (also we bought data about what you like to read for use in our thing we don't really care about the product itself)"
- tedmiston 10y agoI pay for premium today... I wonder if this line will disappear from the product page: Free Premium ... Support Instapaper's continued operation √ https://www.instapaper.com/premium https://www.instapaper.com/premium
- leonatan 10y agoWe'll read about it here soon: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- nroach 10y agoI felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
- markpapadakis 10y agoI used Instapaper for a long time before I switched to a Pocket. There were issues with their parser they never fixed, has been consistently slow, articles would often be lost even though they were "saved" according to the apps that used the Instapaper API(or its browser extensions), it would take forever to download content over 3G ( maybe the client was downloading it? ). It just never got better for me. They did introduce a killer feature(narration) and I switched to Instapaper from Pocket again for that feature alone (2 hours or commute time). Still annoying to use and as soon as Pocket implemented the same feature, I jumped ship again. Pocket seems to be fast(at downloading content, and the iOS app is very responsive), their parser is improving and it's now by far my most used app on my phone. I hope they get the resources they need to really improve their service though. They have lots of happy users and that must mean they are still doing something right.
- reiichiroh 10y agoIs Readability the corporation still solvent? They haven't had any app updates in over a year.
- akamaozu 10y agoNo idea but it's been driving me nuts. I can't read offline bedbugs their Android app is broken. How are you currently using Readability?
- x1798DE 10y agoI got an email to this effect today. I don't remember signing up to get emails, though presumably it was years ago if I did. I unsubscribed and marked as spam, but why is this something that required emailing people about?
- tempodox 10y agoToo bad. It was nice while it lasted.
- romanovtexas 10y agoInstapaper'd the link!