20 ms·

Mozilla Acquires Pocket

1187 points by qdot76367 10y ago

xyos 10y ago
what will happen to pocket premium?
- chrisabrams 10y ago
  It will fund Firefox development :P
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Source?
    - Sylos 10y ago
      I think, he was mostly joking, but it might actually be the case. Sounds like they want to keep the Pocket company intact as it is, just as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Corporation and with everything open-sourced. So, Pocket as a company should continue to try to make a revenue and if they do, that revenue goes upwards into the Mozilla Corporation (and from there upwards into the Mozilla Foundation, if the non-profit nature allows it). There's also Callahad commenting in this thread, who, as far as I'm aware, is a Mozilla employee. And well, he sort of confirmed that this is a move to diversify Mozilla's income streams: >bearcobra 12 hours ago [-] >Does this mark a strategy shift away from search revenue as the primary funding source? A quick crunchbase search for other aquicisions by Mozilla yeilded nothing, so I'm curious if there are other examples of them buying up for-profits. >>callahad 12 hours ago [-] >>Mozilla is actively working to diversify its sources of funding; the greatest step in that was when we switched from a global default of Google search to smaller, regional deals with Yahoo, Google, Yandex, and Baidu toward the end of 2014.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        There were references elsewhere in the thread to comments by Mozilla staff directly, so it appears this is true.
- m52go 10y ago
  did anyone buy pocket premium? i always perceived it as a sales page that got no sales.
  - hgontijo 10y ago
    I did. Mostly because I like/use the tool and I wanted to support their work.
    - pspeter3 10y ago
      I did for the same reasons and also in the hope of having advanced search.
  - rebeccaskinner 10y ago
    I got a year of it through the humble productivity bundle (or something similar) a couple of years ago. It's one of the few things in the bundle that I continued to subscribe to (along with lastpass) after the bundle ran out. It's cheap, and I enjoy the service. I don't really use the premium features so much that their absolutely indispensable, but they are nice. I keep a huge library of stuff in pocket and the unlimited storage space and easier searching is nicer than having to re-google for things.
  - r3bl 10y ago
    I never saw any value to buying a premium. Their free features did the trick, and the only reason I may even consider purchasing a premium for are the ads, which will probably disappear after Mozilla takes it over.
  - krschultz 10y ago
    I did. I'm not sure if there is any features of value, but I pay for all the small apps I use so that the developers don't go out of business.
bearcobra 10y ago
Does this mark a strategy shift away from search revenue as the primary funding source? A quick crunchbase search for other aquicisions by Mozilla yeilded nothing, so I'm curious if there are other examples of them buying up for-profits.
- AaronMT 10y ago
  This is Mozilla's first acquisition.
- ygjb 10y ago
  The only other example is the hiring of three co-founders of Humanized, https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/breaking-mozilla-buying-humanized/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/breaking-mozilla-buying-hu...
- callahad 10y ago
  Mozilla is actively working to diversify its sources of funding; the greatest step in that was when we switched from a global default of Google search to smaller, regional deals with Yahoo, Google, Yandex, and Baidu toward the end of 2014.
datatan 10y ago
So much for my hopes of them removing it from Firefox. Uhg.
- gcp 10y ago
  You can have hope for a better integration than that odd toolbar button and the silly login page that asks you to make Yet Another Password instead of using the Sync/Mozilla account one.
  - r3bl 10y ago
    Aren't you able to log into Pocket using your Mozilla account for a while now?
    - gcp 10y ago
      No, it still requires you to create additional passwords for Pocket.
- mcmahoniel 10y ago
  In case you didn't know, you can remove it from the toolbar via "Customize", or completely disable it by toggling `extensions.pocket.enabled` in `about:config`. That being said, I started using it extensively after being a big fan of Instapaper. The browser integration (especially the easy tagging) has been really helpful in keeping my tab count down.
  - hendersoon 10y ago
    I use a simple bookmarklet for Pocket. This consumes zero resources and works just fine. https://pastebin.mozilla.org/8980504 https://pastebin.mozilla.org/8980504
    - mcmahoniel 10y ago
      That's how Instapaper did it back when I used it (may have a full-fledged add-on now, but I don't know for sure). The only drawback, for me, was the added bulk of the Bookmarks bar. I like to slim it down, so having the single button has been great. (Also, being able to add the tags, but maybe the bookmarklet is capable of that?)
Touche 10y ago
This is weird. Has Mozilla acquired any startups in the past? Feels weird to me for a browser non-profit to own a web app product.
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  This is Mozilla corporation, which l, while being a subsidy of the foundation, is a corporation regardless.
- thomasahle 10y ago
  Right, I thought pocket was actually one of the Mozilla sponsors, given the default installation in Firefox.
  - gcp 10y ago
    It was stated several times that Mozilla didn't get any money from Pocket for the integration.
    - talklittle 10y ago
      That much is unclear. http://www.ghacks.net/2015/12/05/mozilla-has-a-revenue-share-agreement-with-pocket/ http://www.ghacks.net/2015/12/05/mozilla-has-a-revenue-share...
      - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
        Wow, if that article is true then not only were Mozilla [indirectly] taking money for the integrations but they also lied to us all about it. Is there corroboration that Mozilla had/has revenue sharing with Pocket and Telefonica? I've always trusted Mozilla, this suggests that trust has been badly misplaced. I can't help but feel that I'm being suckered somewhere here - who from Mozilla is benefiting personally out of this acquisition and why are they being allowed to steer the ship? It's 14 months since that blog post, I realise it's not news to some, but it's really disappointing to me.
kennymeyers 10y ago
Pocket is one of my favorite products to use. Congratulations to the team!
dleslie 10y ago
As I do a fair amount of offline reading, I'm a fan of pocket.
l3YAVThwTjo1mjl 10y ago
Will it become firefox exclusive?
- gcp 10y ago
  It's more likely to get fully open sourced, I bet, which would make that rather hard?
mi100hael 10y ago
> Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and doubling down on our mission to keep the internet healthy, as a global public resource that’s open and accessible to all. ...by buying a crappy, proprietary app?
- TD-Linux 10y ago
  ... and making it open-source?
- gcp 10y ago
  It has a huge user-base, so we can disagree on crappy. And obviously the latter part is fixable. Pocket was originally a Firefox add-on.
  - rhelmer 10y ago
    The built-in version is too: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensions/pocket https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/exten...
- smacktoward 10y ago
  On the plus side, now it may still be crappy but at least it won't be proprietary anymore!
- rhelmer 10y ago
  > ...by buying a crappy citation needed > proprietary app? fixable
wodenokoto 10y ago
I've always liked Pocket, but felt queasy about its integration with Firefox. I consider this a great move for a better bookmarking experience in Firefox as well as a better pocket service.
- baby 10y ago
  I agree. For example, you can't really see a list of what you pocketed unless you go to their webpage. Or if you want to be able to read them offline, you need to download the Pocket application. I wish all was integrated in Firefox. It's 2017 and a browser needs this and tabs on the side by default.
  - MikusR 10y ago
    The old discontinued extension did exactly this. It had oflline, integrated into sidebar and displayed if you already have added link to pocket.
  - dyukqu 10y ago
    You can have tabs on the side via an addon. Here: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center
    - baby 10y ago
      It kinda sucks compared to tree style tabs though :/
- r3bl 10y ago
  Couldn't agree with you more, I absolutely love both of the brands and use their products regularly, but the Pocket integration into Firefox itself is something I always considered a bad move from the principles perspective. At least including it now makes much more sense.
- toyg 10y ago
  It is ridiculous though. Mozilla already had a sync infrastructure, it didn't need another service just for bookmarks, "only" a decent additional UI. To me, the whole Pocket thing always smelled of cronyism. Someone is friend with someone else, and lo, Pocket appears. People get all angry, Pocket's hockey-stick fails to materialise, and lo, Mozilla bail them out...
philfrasty 10y ago
I have used Pocket for the last five years or so. 99.5% of the articles I bookmark every day I never actually read. Probably should make me think why I use it at all...
- Duhck 10y ago
  I am in the same spot. I bookmark a TON of stuff and I never visit it again. I do sync pocket right before a flight but find myself engaging with it rarely. I find my use of bookmarks akin to liking something on facebook (or even saving it for later, which I never go back to).
- splintercell 10y ago
  I read A LOT on pocket (they sent me an email that I was one of their top 1% readers, with having read 1.7 million words). For me it's a great time saver, I see some interesting article during work, but instead of wasting my time on it during work, I save it for later. Granted I get no signal during the subway where Pocket becomes a really useful app, but it results in me being a lot more efficient with reading.`
  - kilroy123 10y ago
    Same here.
- baby 10y ago
  I Pocket a lot of stuff that I don't read, but in the end, I end up reading more stuff thanks to Pocket anyway.
- outworlder 10y ago
  This is why I created a IFTTT action to add the item to todoist if I have given it a tag ('read', in my case). This way I can go back and read the articles that I really care about, while still saving low priority stuff that I only go through when I'm bored.
- enobrev 10y ago
  I see Pocket as the place where I put incredibly interesting things that I will never see again. I absolutely love Pocket and I have So Many interesting things in there. But I never look. I started putting things in Google Inbox, and I found that I like the reminders to read things - but I don't look at those either. I just keep pushing them back, and eventually, during a less busy week, move them over to Pocket, where I can truly stop reading them. One day, years from now, I'll read everything I've put into pocket over the years and finally understand the universe.
chrisabrams 10y ago
As a former del.ici.ous engineer and user, I'm happy to see that Pocket will be in good hands for a while :)
- r721 10y ago
  Is there any chance you know what's happening with delicious now? Their last blog post is dated "April 24, 2016" [1], and they are silent on Facebook since May 2016 too [2] despite loads of comments. [1] http://blog.del.icio.us/?p=1193 http://blog.del.icio.us/?p=1193 [2] https://www.facebook.com/delicious/posts/10153614657337205 https://www.facebook.com/delicious/posts/10153614657337205
  - jccalhoun 10y ago
    a year or two they went down for about a week. That was the final straw for me and pushed me to pay for pinboard.in. I haven't looked back since. it just works and I don't worry about it going down or going away.
shmerl 10y ago
That's interesting. I see they plan to open source it. I might even use it after that.
apetresc 10y ago
Something I've always wished Pocket would do is download an offline copy of videos I add to the list (using, say, youtube-dl [1]), so I can watch them on the subway, etc. But they never did this, presumably either for legal reasons, or because it was a giant waste of bandwidth considering a huge percentage of Pocketed articles never get read. Now that Mozilla is promising to open-source this, I eagerly await adding this feature to my own fork :) -- [1]: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
- baby 10y ago
  It also kind of sucks with javascript when it downloads the page offline. Pages that use Mathjax or something for LaTeX never display correctly so I can enver read them offline :/
- tertius 10y ago
  See Youtube red.
  - alainv 10y ago
    Youtube Red is not available in most of the world: > available in the United States, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand and South Korea.
    - tertius 10y ago
      I guess they'll have to wait.
  - mplewis 10y ago
    That's a paid service. Youtube-DL is free and open source.
    - dbbk 10y ago
      It is YouTube's prerogative to offer that feature for their paid service.
resfirestar 10y ago
The first thing I do with a new Firefox install is remove the Pocket button, but I still welcome the prospect of seeing the Pocket service becoming open source and part of Firefox Sync. There are definitely some interesting ideas around the Context Graph, and hopefully the Pocket team will be able help move the project forward.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Scea91 10y ago
I've used Pocket in the past but when I started using Evernote I discovered that I do not need Pocket anymore. Is there any killer feature that I do not know about that Pocket offers and Evernote doesn't?
StudyAnimal 10y ago
Wow, I thought it would be the other way around!
grappler 10y ago
Pocket's post about the acquisition, referring to the main value their product brings, says, “a platform where high-quality, thoughtful content and free speech can rise above the rest.” Pocket used to have a feature aimed at surfacing high-quality content from the collection of things a user had already pocketed. They removed that feature. I was paying for their premium service before that change. After they removed it, I stopped the premium subscription because I wasn't sure what pocket's value to me was anymore. Now they have a recommender that recommends things you haven't pocketed yet. But that just encourages the user to accumulate an ever larger collection of pocketed things, not surface the best things in that collection. Ever since, I've reflexively kept saving things to pocket, hoping they would bring that feature back. But the only practical thing I have done with it is pull up something I just saved recently, because it will be near the top of the list. Pocket's CEO also writes, “In fact, we have a few major updates up our sleeves that we are really excited to get into your hands in the coming months.” I hope they will bring that feature, or something with a similar aim, back.
- chrido 10y ago
  I have similar concerns. I really used Pocket a lot. Two times I got an e-mail at the end of the year that I'm in the top 1% of their users. That was nice! I want distraction free reading which means no social recommendations, sharing and other stuff. Things I would really like is pdf support, x days of reading left, auto scrolling and detailed statistics about my reading. Also cool would be some garbage collection, e.g., news articles are useless to read in 2 weeks but a blog post may be still useful in a few years.
- ttam 10y ago
  Not only they removed that feature, but they also removed a bunch of other automatic-categories that I used to love (quick reads!) And, as I've described in a blog post I did about Pocket, the recommendation system they created fails in one huge aspect: it is recommending me things that I've seen elsewhere but just decided not to pocket...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  OK, so it's not just me imagining things. My view is pretty much as yours: POCKET IS MY VETTED WEB. If I've saved stuff there, it's because that is shit I've already determined is worth a second look, and I want to be able to find it again. Increasingly, when I hit my Pocket archive (3k-4k+ items, top 1% user), I find that I cannot find what I'm looking for. This negates approximately 80% of the purpose of having Pocket in the first place, and I've been giving strong thoughts to simply using it as a link dump until I can figure out how to: 1. Download the content myself. 2. Download the tags, which are the most important element. 3. Get the simplified-Web view. Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. 4. Be able to search and filter specifically what I've already fetched. And filter by more options: date, website, author, tags (positive and negative filters), etc. None of that currently exists. And it is increasingly frustrating.
bravura 10y ago
Can Pocket please finally support Facebook links to non-Facebook context? And just strip the Facebook URL junk? Otherwise, you have to click on a FB link to get the unmangled URL, thus counting against your number of free views every month.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Incognito mode. Or Archive.is
stonogo 10y ago
I will never again donate to the Mozilla Foundation.
- callahad 10y ago
  Why's that? This acquisition was carried out by the self-funding Mozilla Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation is a separate entity.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and can acquire startups. Mozilla doesn't have the resources to continue with Thunderbird. I am increasingly baffled by their decisions and how they relate to the strategic plans [0] they've been producing for a while. Despite the worthy words in their plan they seem to have no sense of direction. That saddens me. That said I'm happier having Pocket as an open source part of Mozilla/Firefox than a surprise integration of a commercial app. [0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/MoFo_2020 https://wiki.mozilla.org/MoFo_2020
- Manishearth 10y ago
  I could be wrong here, but the thunderbird thing is basically that it was way too much work for little gain -- the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs. I'm also not sure of this, but that vision thing you link to is focused on the goals of the Foundation proper (excluding MoCo), which is not all of Mozilla, and many of the decisions fall out of that scope.
  - M_- 10y ago
    > the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs. No. Thunderbird was built against something that the Mozilla foundation used to tout as the future of building software in general: XUL. And there also was a XULRunner which was to Gecko/Firefox what Electron is to Blink/Chrome: a way to develop native apps using the browser engine as a UI toolkit. The difference with electron is that it was built with more native-apps facilities, like spawning up Wizard dialogs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tutorial/Creating_a_Wizard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu... All written in their XML. It wasn't developed specifically for Thunderbird. Firefox is also built on top of the same technologies. XULRunner versions were released concurrently with new Firefox versions. The reason why Thunderbird is a dead is because XUL is dead, or rather, will die soon. They are rewriting everything related to UI in Firefox and also terminating the traditional addon API which.. required XUL, in favor of Chrome's addon API. Thunderbird is not the only notable app written in XUL beside Firefox. There's also Miro, Songbird, Google's adwords editor ( https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=e... ) and many others. Most software written in XUL has either been abandoned or going to die, anyway.
vegabook 10y ago
I have no idea what Pocket is, but as a Firefox stalwart and a person looking to learn Rust, the fact that Mozilla is actually acquiring stuff gives me confidence on its financial stability. Very important issue in the decision making process on future technologies to back.
hkmurakami 10y ago
I was shocked to read the news since afaik Mozilla had never made acquisitions like this in the past (which they mention in the post). I'm excited though, since the reason I hadn't used Pocket in the past was because I didn't want to be part of yet another walled garden (YAWG?). A quick look at Crunchbase shows that they'd raised $14.5M from investors. Given Mozilla's ~$300M of annual revenue, I wonder whether this leans towards an acquihire or a technology/product acquisition (definitely not a business acquisition). Difficult for me to assess the significance of 10M users for a company like Mozilla.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  My general rule of thumb is that if they don't announce a price it's an acquihire.
kensai 10y ago
"save to pocket" :D
niftich 10y ago
Oh, what a twist! In a story that began two years ago with Pocket's integration by Mozilla [1] in Firefox [2], large segments of the userbase spoke out with scathing criticism. This, at first blush, appears unrelated: Mozilla previously announced its Context Graph initiative, which was a bold undertaking to be built partially upon a new and emerging set of W3C standards to take back some of the control over linkage, metadata, and the consumption and annotation of web content [3] from big incumbent providers who run content portals, content silos, or content aggregators (largely the usual suspects, including Google, Facebook [4], Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo [5]). To understand this play, temporarily forget about Mozilla the Foundation, and think about Mozilla as a strategic competitor to the above. In the case of Pocket, a hard-to-deny side effect is that Pocket's presence in Firefox, despite the exact nature of the integration, is likely here to stay. While this is bound to frustrate many, Mozilla's competitors routinely ship software or entire platforms with tight captive integrations, against which competition has proven difficult to mount solely on the merits of values and philosophical purity. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=firefox%20pocket https://hn.algolia.com/?query=firefox%20pocket [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mozilla%20pocket https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mozilla%20pocket [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525#13740110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525#13740110 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375451#13375917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375451#13375917 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493
- omouse 10y ago
  My only problem with Pocket was that it was proprietary and it was integrated with Firefox. If it's released under and open source license, then I'll be glad to have it integrated. Pocket makes Mozilla competitive on mobile because Firefox's market share on mobile is very low.
  - nnethercote 10y ago
    Pocket will be open sourced.
    - 10y ago
throwaway206801 10y ago
Mozilla can spend money on this, but not Thunderbird or XUL-based extensions?
- Traubenfuchs 10y ago
  It seems we have have been taken to a bizzaro parallel earth where people enjoy built it bloat that should be an addon in their formerly highly customizeable browser.
  - rhelmer 10y ago
    The Pocket integration in Firefox is very simple and is in fact a built-in add-on. I think it's a failure of imagination to assume that this is going to be the extent of what Pocket will be able to contribute... they have a lot of users and popular mobile apps for instance which is useful on its own. As the blog post points out, the hope is that Pocket will accelerate the context graph initiative. So, I disagree that it's about "bloat" or customization. In any case, the Pocket add-on is like ~700k and it doesn't do anything if you take it off the toolbar...
- rhelmer 10y ago
  It's more a question of "won't" rather than "can't". Why do you think XUL and Thunderbird are good investments vs. things like Servo or the context graph initiative (which the Pocket team is going to accelerate according to the blog post)? Do you think a non-standard framework for making fat native apps and a mail client built on this framework are going to make Mozilla more relevant?
  - rhelmer 10y ago
    The reason I bring up Servo is that parts of it are already starting to land in Gecko and will ship with Firefox soon - do you think making Servo support XUL is a good use of anyone's time?
justanton 10y ago
How does Mozilla earn money?
- zobzu 10y ago
  Search engine deals, and now pocket
gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
Why would someone use pocket over zotero?
- lllllll 10y ago
  In my case, because it syncs with my Kobo Aura HD ebook reader. That way I can read "my internet" offline :)
- mcintyre1994 10y ago
  I just searched zotero in the App Store and got nothing, so because every morning I save stuff from Feedly into Pocket and I have no idea how I'd do that with zotero.
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
    Did you try googling that?
    - mcintyre1994 10y ago
      Yea, I found their website : https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/ Available for Windows, Mac and Linux. So no mobile apps at all, Pocket apps are great so that's a good reason to choose them over Zotero.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Fair question, and one I'm asking myself increasingly, though: 1. Zotero doesn't have a full-service (or any?) Android app. Which is my primary reading platform. So it's simply not an option. 2. More straightforward onramp. It's pretty easy to figure out what the fuck to do with Pocket, though after a bit, it gets utterly unusable with scale (I've got ~3-4k articles, possibly more, the fact that I can't even extract a !@#$%^&() count is a major PITA, and referencing them Simply Doesn't Work. 3. Simplified and uniform presentation. Web design isn't the solution. Web design is the problem. I prefer Pocket's styling to ANYTHING* any website can throw at me, with exceptions I can count on the fingers of one hand. Most of which I've made myself. Frankly, I'm utterly frustrated with use of the Web as a research and archival tool, and none of the options I've seen yet are satisfactory.
SwellJoe 10y ago
Pocket, for me, is a weird product/feature. I've tried to use it, but it ends up just being like a clumsy bookmarking feature. Allegedly, you can read things offline, but that feature never works for me. It seems the feature for offline reading doesn't exist at all in Firefox (which I'd assumed was the point of its integration, but my assumption was wrong), and I've tried the Chrome desktop app and the Android mobile app ..nothing I save to pocket is ever readable without a data connection. It must work for some content for some people because I see people talking about it like it does. But, without that feature I see literally no utility in Pocket...it's just a clunky bolted-on bookmark manager, and so I end up going back to bookmarks with tags. I use Sync and I have Firefox on all of my devices. So, my bookmarks go with me. So, I guess it's good that it's going open source. I wasn't comfortable with the way integration was presented back when they added it...it wasn't at all apparent, to me, that Pocket was a third party for-profit entity when the "setup your pocket" process launched in Firefox, since I'd never heard of it before that. But, it still seems like a solution looking for a problem. I'll give it another look. Maybe I was just unlucky with my choices of what to save...but it seems like if offline reading is not going to work on a page (for whatever reason) it should warn you. It'd suck to get on a train/plane or get lost in the woods, with plans to catch up on some reading, only to find there's nothing there. But, maybe that's not even the primary purpose of Pocket? I dunno, it's still pretty fuzzy to me wtf it's for, if not that.
- sharkbot 10y ago
  The Kobo ereaders have had Pocket integration for a while now, and it works great offline. My usual routine is to find interesting articles on Hacker News, and if they are longer than a page or two, click the Pocket button and read them at home on the ereader. A few don't render well (the article on Arrival/Story of your Life not being a time-travel story was a recent fail), but generally it works great.
  - padraic7a 10y ago
    I love this feature. My only concern was being tied into Pocket and wondering what might happen to the company. I imagine that being acquired by Mozilla makes that future a bit more secure.
DanCarvajal 10y ago
Two apps I no longer use because they became bloated and unfocused, they deserve each other
cpeterso 10y ago
The Firefox bug to open source Pocket: https://bugzil.la/open-pocket https://bugzil.la/open-pocket
zyngaro 10y ago
"We believe that the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content is key to keeping the internet healthy by fighting against the rising tide of centralization and walled gardens" that alone is a reason to welcome this aquisition. Facebook has become for many, me included the entry point to the web much more so than the browser and I really don't like that. I can imagine Mozilla suggest content to users based in what they have saved in the past on pocket and integration with Firefox. Nice move.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  I suppose then that the strategy will be "the browser as a platform" vs "FB as a platform", with the technical difference that all FF tools will be open source? That actually sounds promising. Next logical content vertical would be video then (judging from FB's content importance)
dochtman 10y ago
I'll keep saying that Mozilla should acquire Fastmail. Now that would be a strategic acquisition.
- morganvachon 10y ago
  Please, no. I think part of the reason Fastmail has been able to focus on the user experience is because they are independent. I don't want them acquired, disbanded, and dumped. It's the best paid service I've ever used.
- gkoberger 10y ago
  There's a joke at Mozilla that "Opera did it first". Pretty much every new feature in Firefox, Chrome, etc has appeared first in Opera. In this case: https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/opera-fastmail/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/opera-fastmail/
  - toxican 10y ago
    Funny how far Opera has fallen these past few years. Years ago it was setting trends with tabs. Now it's yet another Chromium-based browser.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
AJRF 10y ago
I was wishing Pocket would offer AWS Polly playback for articles, so I started making my own app to do it. Now that it is going open source I might just piggy back their parser as its a good bit better than mine. Hope they build in some Context Graph projects into Pocket, as there is some great ideas their.
justin_vanw 10y ago
Synergy: One product that nobody uses is now bundled with another one.
wirddin 10y ago
Huge fan of the Pocket App. Any guesses for how much the deal would be worth?
phs 10y ago
I've been lately dissatisfied with pocket and related apps for lacking some admittedly fringe features. The possibility of adding them myself without rebuilding the whole app is exciting!
Roritharr 10y ago
After this, why should I donate to Mozilla? I really don't get what's the difference between donating to Mozilla and donating to Facebook. Facebook open-sources some of their stuff. Facebook buys companies to generate revenues... I guess Mozilla doesn't need help anymore.
- Vinnl 10y ago
  Mozilla open sources everything, and has an open Internet as its mission? I'd trust them to do that with Pocket far more than Facebook with... Facebook.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  I don't understand your point. Are you upset they bought Pocket?
  - ajasmin 10y ago
    Mozilla's donation page says: We are proudly non-profit, non-corporate. I don't know the ins and out of Mozilla dual identity as a foundation/corporation. But it'd be unsettling to learn that part of your donations to an open-source project is financing a corporate acquisition.
- callahad 10y ago
  Donations to "Mozilla" go to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which does exceptional, meaningful work. Firefox is developed by the Foundation's self-funding, for-profit subsidary, the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo). MoCo acquired Pocket, using its own funds. For legal / tax reasons, MoCo can only push a tiny fraction of its revenue up into the Foundation. This means that donations are necessary to sustain the Foundation's initiatives.
  - hkmurakami 10y ago
    I feel like sufficiently large numbers of people are confused about the arrangement of the company and the foundation (I definitely don't know the details of the money flow between the two), that this warrants some kind of easily referable page on Mozilla's website. (appreciate you clarifying this here)
bttf 10y ago
I have been working on a prototype for a competitor to Pocket and other save-for-later services with an emphasis on minimalism, privacy and ease of use. https://slushi.es https://slushi.es Very early app, features are rolling out daily. My end goal is to build a recommendation engine out of user data, while keeping things anonymous. Although social bookmarking has been done plenty times before, I think execution has been sub-par in previous solutions. My aim is to make things streamlined and fast for the user to go from 'what was that link?' to 'there it is' (sidenote: check out slushi.es opensearch, and how it behaves when there's one result (only works for signed-in users)). A complaint I hear often from Pocket users (and other save-for-later users alike) is that they will save 100s of links without ever going back to reading them. I, too, shared the same sentiment until one day I experienced a 'what was that link again?' moment. It was rare and fleeting at the time, but since using slushi.es more and more, those moments have appeared with increasing frequency. I believe the best save-for-later app will transform the regular web browsing individual's habits of reading an article and forgetting about it, to reading an article and remembering it later; either a day later, a month later, or perhaps years. The thing is remembering. I think a good save-for-later app works as a memory reinforcer; something that augments your ability to build and recall knowledge.
- threatofrain 10y ago
  I'd be curious to see an organization scheme other than just tags, as I suspect that it leads to difficult to trim (potentially always climbing up) bloat and cognitive load.
  - bttf 10y ago
    interesting point. tags have been a feature we have not added yet partly because they seem slightly superfluous. the user is able to search across titles, descriptions, URLs, and can curate links with lists. not sure if tags can provide any extra value
    - UnfalseDesign 10y ago
      If your goal is to create a service that's main feature is content discoverability, I would think that tags are essential. It would provide you with great metrics for knowing what the user prefers. For instance, "They tend to tag lots of funny stories on Saturday. The tag tech news on Monday and Tuesday. They tag movie news on Thursday." Your recommendation engine would then be able to suggest articles to them. "Other users have tagged these stories as tech news and it is Monday. Here's your Monday feed!" I'm not saying you can't make a working product without them. I'm simply saying you probably can't make a competitive product without them.
djhworld 10y ago
I use Instapaper on a daily basis, how does Pocket compare?
- yla92 10y ago
  Nowadays, I add an article to both Instapaper and Pocket. I used to use Pocket a lot but sticking on Instapaper more. Things I love about Pocket are - Curated (and from other people I followed) "recommendations", - tags "Best Of", "Quick Reads". - beautiful android app Instapaper has less features than Pocket but I find that - Instapaper article parser is better, - UI is cleaner, highlights ( I love these!), - ability to switch style (type faces, article background) - speed read - they also have "Browse" (something similar to Pocket's recommendation?) but in Android app, it's a bit hidden in the drawer menu so I don't use it often.
- bartvk 10y ago
  Pocket has clients on more exotic platforms, such as the Kobo eReaders.
- ikurei 10y ago
  These are the most salient differences in my experience with both: - Apart from saving the parsed, "readable" version of an article, it can also save the web as-it-is. This is very useful for those times when the formatting is important (as it is in articles that include code; you loose syntax-highlighting with the readable view. Pocket can be set to try and choose the best view for each article. - It does a great job with videos. - It uses tags instead of folders. - Instapaper has been less reliable for me (specially the android app), although in fairness I've used it more, so I'd notice it's unreliability more often. I'm not that interested in recommendations, but I gotta admit that the few times I've looked at them, Pocket's recommendations were fairly good. I've been using Instapaper for around two years now, keeping Pocket as a bag of less-important links, not-really-reading-material, and very often video. I was thinking of going back to Pocket as my main read-it-later service, specially for the first feature I mentioned. It being Mozilla-owned and some day also OSS will surely be a further advantage in my mind.
hitlin37 10y ago
this is really great news. i like pocket integration on kobo aura one. i hope they keep making that integration improvements further.
dewiz 10y ago
When they add ML clustering to one's pages, so that I stop using bookmarks, and find useful stuff automatically grouped together, plus recommendations...then perhaps I'll start using it
gnicholas 10y ago
I use Pocket differently than most people here. I never save articles to Pocket — I just use their Recommended engine to find interesting articles to read. Some of these come from sources I regularly read (NYT), but others come from obscure sources or big sources that I tend not to read for whatever reason. In a small way, it helps me get news from outside my bubble, and sometimes I'll end up reading regularly from a source I discover through Pocket. My only complaint is that a large portion of the Recommended content is junk from Business Insider. Hopefully this will wane as Mozilla's priorities are implemented.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  The ability to blacklist sources would be fucking awesome. I'm mostly limited to firewalling domains at my router. Doesn't stop them from turning up on, e.g., Web search.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
It sounds like a good plan, making Firefox a platform for organizing information while web browsing, research, etc. A question: what advantages privacy-wise does Firefox have over Safari on iPad and macOS? I frequently delete all cookies on Safari and set strong privacy options. I ask because I have transitioned in the last year or so to working on my iPad and MacBook, largely letting my Linux boxes collect dust. On Linux, using Firefox was an easy decision. On iPad and MacBook, Safari is more convenient.
manigandham 10y ago
This will give them plenty of data for their ad network, which is a nice strategic move. They always claimed to be privacy conscious so this is perhaps a nicer way to get interest and behavior information.
- manigandham 10y ago
  Interesting that people think Mozilla either isn't or is against being an ad network... every single attempt to do adblocking/protection ends up being an ad network eventually (if there's a corporation behind it).
- rhelmer 10y ago
  I'm not sure which ad network you mean - there was an effort to serve ads on the new-tab "tiles" page but that was shut down a little over a year ago: https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/12/04/advancing-content/ https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/12/04/advanci...
no_wizard 10y ago
I never used pocket, but I use instapaper. I wonder if Pocket will be completely free now or if mozilla counts on this to fund more of its efforts. Beyond that. I also wonder if this means a read it later service will finally properly support RSS. Forgive me I don't know the features of pocket but as i understand it is does not correct? I been using the built in firefox RSS feeder for years. with pocket integration it'd be a lot more useful.
ptrptr 10y ago
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po... explanation for this move is very laconic IMO. What are benefits? We already know majority of user were against even basic integration with pocket.
jrcii 10y ago
To me, Pocket is one of those cluttery icons I need to move off of the toolbar when I setup a new copy of Firefox for someone. If I did want that functionality, which I don't, I'd use an extension called Scrapbook.
Proven 10y ago
Screw Mozilla and their data mining BS. I've been thinking of finding a self-hosted alternative to Pocket and now I want to hurry up. Anybody knows of any self-hosted alternatives?
idlewords 10y ago
Ahahahahaha
rocky1138 10y ago
If you're interested in using Pocket in Chrome/Chromium but aren't ready to hand over the insane amount of permissions required for their official extension, you can run the Add to Pocket (mini) extension. https://johnrockefeller.net/use-pocket-without-being-tracked/ https://johnrockefeller.net/use-pocket-without-being-tracked...
adultSwim 10y ago
I think this is great. I'm weary of add-ons/extensions so only run a couple (which are from providers I trust) I didn't really trust my saved article data to a random startup. Being under Mozilla means now I'll actually use it.
ttam 10y ago
Dear Mozilla, I'd love to help out with Pocket. As a concerned user, I even wrote this a few months ago http://constantbetasoftware.com/2016/09/02/pocket.html http://constantbetasoftware.com/2016/09/02/pocket.html How can I apply?
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  Well there's a Mozilla employee posting in this discussion thread, so you might start by reaching out to him. He'll likely have some suggestions.
- callahad 10y ago
  Pocket is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Corporation, so Pocket retains a great deal of autonomy within their organization. Since Mozilla acquired the entire team, I'd start by reaching out to the individuals listed on https://getpocket.com/about/ https://getpocket.com/about/. Longer term, my understanding is that we want to use Pocket's expertise and data to help build a recommendation engine for the open Web (Context Graph: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Context_Graph https://wiki.mozilla.org/Context_Graph). This speaks directly to the problem of sites like Instagram which restrict links to external sites: users can enter via URLs, but they can't navigate away. (More reading: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blogfather-facebook-instagram-and-twitter-are-killing-the-web https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blo...). If anything could help users route themselves out of these silos, it'd be a huge win for the openness of the Web.
  - just_testing 10y ago
    Thanks, I'll try to get in touch with them. I'd love to help on the recommendation engine. I'm (for two years now) at the top 1% of users. I also happen to live in Brazil, to be a native portuguese speaker and the recommendation system absolutely sucks. I get a lot of articles regarding startups and Trump, but absolutely nothing in portuguese and/or about Brazil.
TekMol 10y ago
Mozilla has the resources to buy companies. But not the resources to make videos play smoothly. 2017 and Firefox has no hardware accelerated video playback on Linux. Every time I read about something Mozilla does, I am reminded of this xkcd comic from 2013: https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/
1wheel 10y ago
I hope they'll remove some of the "growth-hacker" stuff from the chrome extension. Modifying the new tab page and injecting links on pages by default is super annoying.
codeisawesome 10y ago
I LOVE POCKET! I'm only very happy to hear that it's Mozilla who has bought them. Warm feelings of security and privacy.
prirun 10y ago
They're losing their Yahoo search money in the future and need to make it up somehow.
bharani_m 10y ago
This is an interesting development. I am curious to see how they take this integration forward. Specifically, I have questions whether it will still have a Premium component or will it be made completely open-source. For those interested in an alternative, I am currently building a simpler bookmarking tool [1] that works pretty much exactly like Pocket or Instapaper. Email This will extract useful content from a page and send it to you via email instead of you having to download an additional app or login to another service to access your bookmarks. [1] https://www.emailthis.me https://www.emailthis.me
dredmorbius 10y ago
I hope this is good news. I've been using Pocket for a couple of years, and am a top-1% user. It's been useful, though also highly frustrating, and is at best only about a 50% solution. I've provided considerable feedback to Pocket over issues and features. Over the course of a couple of years, few if any of them appear to be addressed, which has been highly disheartening. (Any Pocket folk: I'm "dredmorbius" at gmail, though not in my account, which is otherwise attributed, because, you know, privacy, Kristalnacht, Snowden, etc., etc.) I'd previously used Readability, which was nice in fixing a primary problem of online content: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. But that service shut down, on 30 days notice (though with loud signs for the previous couple of years) last September. I spent several days largely manually transferring information out of Readability (404 links meant that a straight export wasn't useful -- I had to track down alternative references where possible). I'm hoping I don't have to go through that again. I've looked at other alternatives: Instapaper (no compelling use case), Pinboard.in, by our very own @idlewords (his comment below was ... not particularly useful). Upshot: without a very specific walkthrough of the product, I can't tell if it's worth my time, and my time would be a week or month of trying to reconstruct the structure I already have in Pocket, in Pinboard. I've visited the "Tour" link multiple times, and no, it isn't clear that this offers me anything useful. I'm thinking that RMS's model of having an email-based web-requesting systsem might actually be more useful than anything else. A Mutt (or Emacs mail-mode) searchable, taggable archive, date-sorted, threadable/groupable, would be a huge win over a lot of other alternatives. I've been thinking through other ways in which I might create my own self-hosted archive repository. Zotero is another option, though again, I can't quite penetrate the use model / workflow. In both cases, the prospect of being stuck with as-published layouts rather than as-useful layouts (have I mentioned: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem) is disheartening. I'd really like to have an offline / commandline tool which could manage webpage decrufting. I'm aware that it's not a fully deterministic process -- the problem with the Web, for better or worse (I've been suspecting the latter for some time) is that there are no publishing standards, and content follows no consistent form. That said, much content can be divided into two general categories: 1) known states of fucked up and 2) unknown states of fucked up. Growing the size of category one, and taking the hopeless cases and simply stripping all markup from it and starting from scratch (something I do myself, manually, far more often than I care to think) is a semi-reasonable approach. I've written a few times on what's plaguing the Web (as have others, Maciej's rants are particulalry recommended). Tabbed browsing: a band-aid: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_... The Reference Management Problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/50o1jv/the_references_management_problem_readability/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/50o1jv/the_ref... And some general feedback (wrapped around some specific feedback) to Pocket: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/3eucmp_s0tumjuoxmfclbw https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/3eucmp_s0tumjuoxmfclbw (Yes, it's heavy on the caps and asterisks -- it's difficult otherwise to indicate important points in email. SoKookMeHarder...) Borrowing from that last: Don't put solving your own problems ahead of solving those of your users. The features I do use, heavily, and would like to see improved, are article view (many websites remain glitchy, I'm well aware this is a whackamole problem, but it does need to be continually addressed), import (I've been working through a backlog of 2,000+ Readability articles migrating to Pocket, slowly, one-at-a-time, there's no automated tool), bulk-action tools, sub-corpus tools (working on a specific set of articles at a time), and tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags (did I say tags) tags tags tags. And more tags. A principle, perhaps the principle problem with the Web as it stands is organisation particularly as concerns quality and vetted content. There are various sources who can vet content. Some are good. There's one I especially trust, and whose judgement over what I like is strong: ME. I've commented before, AND CONTINUE TO HUGELY APPRECIATE several features of Pocket, especially the ability to peform full-text searches of my current and archived articles. It's HUGE. One of my (many) interests is COGNITIVE LOAD. Pocket is a tool for REDUCING COGNITIVE LOAD when reading online media. I see several mechanisms: 1. A standardised presentation of Web content. I can look at an article, and identify what is the primary content (virtually all of it), what's metadata (usually the top -- you do a good job but I'd love to see this improved as well), and where the controls are (standard Pocket bits). 2. Elimination of online distractions. Sidebars. Ads. Animations. Videos. Spurious links. Shitty page layout. Shitty font choices. Shitty colour choices. Shitty CSS choices. 3. Format optimised for my device and preferences. I love you to tears for not having to fuck with zoom, font choices, background/foreground colour, etc., etc., etc., on Every Fucking Webpage. ("Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem.") Huge. Or is that "Hyuuuuge!" now? 4. My own curation. Anything I've saved to Pocket I've seen at least once. There's a familiarity in returning to material which makes it more valuable. 5. Tags. Again, my assigned classifications for material. (And often picks selected from Pocket's tag suggestions, which are quite good.)
leopld 10y ago
I think it would be great if they looked into merging the existing bookmarks system with Pocket!
nkkollaw 10y ago
My impression is that most things that Mozilla starts, they shut down. I was following their experiments, and they shut all of them down while some of them were already working. I used to use Thunderbird years ago, but they completely stopped working on it. I just hope they don't kill Pocket, since I use it every day to save things to read later.
itsjamesfoster 10y ago
that's great
jslakro 10y ago
Yeah! At last I can change Feedly! Any advice before migrating?
KarlFreeman 10y ago
It's fairly early stage but I've been actively building an alternative to Pocket called Filltray (https://filltray.com https://filltray.com). I found myself being overwhelmed by products like Pocket/Instapaper so wanted to build something different. A place to keep things for "short" periods of time but without the baggage of having 100s of items permanently on your never-ending reading list. A "do-later" place that may or might not come around. A couple months ago I put up a public roadmap (https://medium.com/filltray/public-product-roadmap-3964c3fa4398 https://medium.com/filltray/public-product-roadmap-3964c3fa4...) and I'm continuing to work hard to produce a product which meets mine — and I think others — needs for a rethink on read-later. Please feel free to follow @filltray to keep up to date with my progress :)!
vivekd 10y ago
I use pocket because it is automatically synced with my Kobo e-reader. One thing I wish they would offer is folders. Before I bought the kobo I stuck with instapaper just because of the cleaner interface and the option to use folders. I get that pocket offers the option to tag, but different people have different preferences and folders would be nice. Also a bunch of large squares doesn't seem to be the best way to organize information consisting of web blogs and pictures. Hopefully mozilla will make some UX changes to pocket.
SZJX 10y ago
Seems that the user data/behavioral patterns is really always the most important thing for this type of services huh? The aim was mostly to get acquired and it seems that the acquirer always has an eye on the vast amount of data etc.

1187 points by qdot76367 10y ago

xyos 10y ago

what will happen to pocket premium?

chrisabrams 10y ago
It will fund Firefox development :P
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Source?
  - Sylos 10y ago
    I think, he was mostly joking, but it might actually be the case. Sounds like they want to keep the Pocket company intact as it is, just as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Corporation and with everything open-sourced. So, Pocket as a company should continue to try to make a revenue and if they do, that revenue goes upwards into the Mozilla Corporation (and from there upwards into the Mozilla Foundation, if the non-profit nature allows it). There's also Callahad commenting in this thread, who, as far as I'm aware, is a Mozilla employee. And well, he sort of confirmed that this is a move to diversify Mozilla's income streams: >bearcobra 12 hours ago [-] >Does this mark a strategy shift away from search revenue as the primary funding source? A quick crunchbase search for other aquicisions by Mozilla yeilded nothing, so I'm curious if there are other examples of them buying up for-profits. >>callahad 12 hours ago [-] >>Mozilla is actively working to diversify its sources of funding; the greatest step in that was when we switched from a global default of Google search to smaller, regional deals with Yahoo, Google, Yandex, and Baidu toward the end of 2014.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      There were references elsewhere in the thread to comments by Mozilla staff directly, so it appears this is true.
m52go 10y ago
did anyone buy pocket premium? i always perceived it as a sales page that got no sales.
- hgontijo 10y ago
  I did. Mostly because I like/use the tool and I wanted to support their work.
  - pspeter3 10y ago
    I did for the same reasons and also in the hope of having advanced search.
- rebeccaskinner 10y ago
  I got a year of it through the humble productivity bundle (or something similar) a couple of years ago. It's one of the few things in the bundle that I continued to subscribe to (along with lastpass) after the bundle ran out. It's cheap, and I enjoy the service. I don't really use the premium features so much that their absolutely indispensable, but they are nice. I keep a huge library of stuff in pocket and the unlimited storage space and easier searching is nicer than having to re-google for things.
- r3bl 10y ago
  I never saw any value to buying a premium. Their free features did the trick, and the only reason I may even consider purchasing a premium for are the ads, which will probably disappear after Mozilla takes it over.
- krschultz 10y ago
  I did. I'm not sure if there is any features of value, but I pay for all the small apps I use so that the developers don't go out of business.

bearcobra 10y ago

Does this mark a strategy shift away from search revenue as the primary funding source? A quick crunchbase search for other aquicisions by Mozilla yeilded nothing, so I'm curious if there are other examples of them buying up for-profits.

AaronMT 10y ago
This is Mozilla's first acquisition.
ygjb 10y ago
The only other example is the hiring of three co-founders of Humanized, https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/breaking-mozilla-buying-humanized/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/breaking-mozilla-buying-hu...
callahad 10y ago
Mozilla is actively working to diversify its sources of funding; the greatest step in that was when we switched from a global default of Google search to smaller, regional deals with Yahoo, Google, Yandex, and Baidu toward the end of 2014.

datatan 10y ago

So much for my hopes of them removing it from Firefox. Uhg.

gcp 10y ago
You can have hope for a better integration than that odd toolbar button and the silly login page that asks you to make Yet Another Password instead of using the Sync/Mozilla account one.
- r3bl 10y ago
  Aren't you able to log into Pocket using your Mozilla account for a while now?
  - gcp 10y ago
    No, it still requires you to create additional passwords for Pocket.
mcmahoniel 10y ago
In case you didn't know, you can remove it from the toolbar via "Customize", or completely disable it by toggling `extensions.pocket.enabled` in `about:config`. That being said, I started using it extensively after being a big fan of Instapaper. The browser integration (especially the easy tagging) has been really helpful in keeping my tab count down.
- hendersoon 10y ago
  I use a simple bookmarklet for Pocket. This consumes zero resources and works just fine. https://pastebin.mozilla.org/8980504 https://pastebin.mozilla.org/8980504
  - mcmahoniel 10y ago
    That's how Instapaper did it back when I used it (may have a full-fledged add-on now, but I don't know for sure). The only drawback, for me, was the added bulk of the Bookmarks bar. I like to slim it down, so having the single button has been great. (Also, being able to add the tags, but maybe the bookmarklet is capable of that?)

Touche 10y ago

This is weird. Has Mozilla acquired any startups in the past? Feels weird to me for a browser non-profit to own a web app product.

adamnemecek 10y ago
This is Mozilla corporation, which l, while being a subsidy of the foundation, is a corporation regardless.
thomasahle 10y ago
Right, I thought pocket was actually one of the Mozilla sponsors, given the default installation in Firefox.
- gcp 10y ago
  It was stated several times that Mozilla didn't get any money from Pocket for the integration.
  - talklittle 10y ago
    That much is unclear. http://www.ghacks.net/2015/12/05/mozilla-has-a-revenue-share-agreement-with-pocket/ http://www.ghacks.net/2015/12/05/mozilla-has-a-revenue-share...
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      Wow, if that article is true then not only were Mozilla [indirectly] taking money for the integrations but they also lied to us all about it. Is there corroboration that Mozilla had/has revenue sharing with Pocket and Telefonica? I've always trusted Mozilla, this suggests that trust has been badly misplaced. I can't help but feel that I'm being suckered somewhere here - who from Mozilla is benefiting personally out of this acquisition and why are they being allowed to steer the ship? It's 14 months since that blog post, I realise it's not news to some, but it's really disappointing to me.

kennymeyers 10y ago

Pocket is one of my favorite products to use. Congratulations to the team!

dleslie 10y ago

As I do a fair amount of offline reading, I'm a fan of pocket.

l3YAVThwTjo1mjl 10y ago

Will it become firefox exclusive?

gcp 10y ago
It's more likely to get fully open sourced, I bet, which would make that rather hard?

mi100hael 10y ago

> Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and doubling down on our mission to keep the internet healthy, as a global public resource that’s open and accessible to all. ...by buying a crappy, proprietary app?

TD-Linux 10y ago
... and making it open-source?
gcp 10y ago
It has a huge user-base, so we can disagree on crappy. And obviously the latter part is fixable. Pocket was originally a Firefox add-on.
- rhelmer 10y ago
  The built-in version is too: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensions/pocket https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/exten...
smacktoward 10y ago
On the plus side, now it may still be crappy but at least it won't be proprietary anymore!
rhelmer 10y ago
> ...by buying a crappy citation needed > proprietary app? fixable

wodenokoto 10y ago

I've always liked Pocket, but felt queasy about its integration with Firefox. I consider this a great move for a better bookmarking experience in Firefox as well as a better pocket service.

baby 10y ago
I agree. For example, you can't really see a list of what you pocketed unless you go to their webpage. Or if you want to be able to read them offline, you need to download the Pocket application. I wish all was integrated in Firefox. It's 2017 and a browser needs this and tabs on the side by default.
- MikusR 10y ago
  The old discontinued extension did exactly this. It had oflline, integrated into sidebar and displayed if you already have added link to pocket.
- dyukqu 10y ago
  You can have tabs on the side via an addon. Here: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center
  - baby 10y ago
    It kinda sucks compared to tree style tabs though :/
r3bl 10y ago
Couldn't agree with you more, I absolutely love both of the brands and use their products regularly, but the Pocket integration into Firefox itself is something I always considered a bad move from the principles perspective. At least including it now makes much more sense.
toyg 10y ago
It is ridiculous though. Mozilla already had a sync infrastructure, it didn't need another service just for bookmarks, "only" a decent additional UI. To me, the whole Pocket thing always smelled of cronyism. Someone is friend with someone else, and lo, Pocket appears. People get all angry, Pocket's hockey-stick fails to materialise, and lo, Mozilla bail them out...

philfrasty 10y ago

I have used Pocket for the last five years or so. 99.5% of the articles I bookmark every day I never actually read. Probably should make me think why I use it at all...

Duhck 10y ago
I am in the same spot. I bookmark a TON of stuff and I never visit it again. I do sync pocket right before a flight but find myself engaging with it rarely. I find my use of bookmarks akin to liking something on facebook (or even saving it for later, which I never go back to).
splintercell 10y ago
I read A LOT on pocket (they sent me an email that I was one of their top 1% readers, with having read 1.7 million words). For me it's a great time saver, I see some interesting article during work, but instead of wasting my time on it during work, I save it for later. Granted I get no signal during the subway where Pocket becomes a really useful app, but it results in me being a lot more efficient with reading.`
- kilroy123 10y ago
  Same here.
baby 10y ago
I Pocket a lot of stuff that I don't read, but in the end, I end up reading more stuff thanks to Pocket anyway.
outworlder 10y ago
This is why I created a IFTTT action to add the item to todoist if I have given it a tag ('read', in my case). This way I can go back and read the articles that I really care about, while still saving low priority stuff that I only go through when I'm bored.
enobrev 10y ago
I see Pocket as the place where I put incredibly interesting things that I will never see again. I absolutely love Pocket and I have So Many interesting things in there. But I never look. I started putting things in Google Inbox, and I found that I like the reminders to read things - but I don't look at those either. I just keep pushing them back, and eventually, during a less busy week, move them over to Pocket, where I can truly stop reading them. One day, years from now, I'll read everything I've put into pocket over the years and finally understand the universe.

chrisabrams 10y ago

As a former del.ici.ous engineer and user, I'm happy to see that Pocket will be in good hands for a while :)

r721 10y ago
Is there any chance you know what's happening with delicious now? Their last blog post is dated "April 24, 2016" [1], and they are silent on Facebook since May 2016 too [2] despite loads of comments. [1] http://blog.del.icio.us/?p=1193 http://blog.del.icio.us/?p=1193 [2] https://www.facebook.com/delicious/posts/10153614657337205 https://www.facebook.com/delicious/posts/10153614657337205
- jccalhoun 10y ago
  a year or two they went down for about a week. That was the final straw for me and pushed me to pay for pinboard.in. I haven't looked back since. it just works and I don't worry about it going down or going away.

shmerl 10y ago

That's interesting. I see they plan to open source it. I might even use it after that.

apetresc 10y ago

Something I've always wished Pocket would do is download an offline copy of videos I add to the list (using, say, youtube-dl [1]), so I can watch them on the subway, etc. But they never did this, presumably either for legal reasons, or because it was a giant waste of bandwidth considering a huge percentage of Pocketed articles never get read. Now that Mozilla is promising to open-source this, I eagerly await adding this feature to my own fork :) -- [1]: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

baby 10y ago
It also kind of sucks with javascript when it downloads the page offline. Pages that use Mathjax or something for LaTeX never display correctly so I can enver read them offline :/
tertius 10y ago
See Youtube red.
- alainv 10y ago
  Youtube Red is not available in most of the world: > available in the United States, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand and South Korea.
  - tertius 10y ago
    I guess they'll have to wait.
- mplewis 10y ago
  That's a paid service. Youtube-DL is free and open source.
  - dbbk 10y ago
    It is YouTube's prerogative to offer that feature for their paid service.

resfirestar 10y ago

The first thing I do with a new Firefox install is remove the Pocket button, but I still welcome the prospect of seeing the Pocket service becoming open source and part of Firefox Sync. There are definitely some interesting ideas around the Context Graph, and hopefully the Pocket team will be able help move the project forward.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Scea91 10y ago

I've used Pocket in the past but when I started using Evernote I discovered that I do not need Pocket anymore. Is there any killer feature that I do not know about that Pocket offers and Evernote doesn't?

StudyAnimal 10y ago

Wow, I thought it would be the other way around!

grappler 10y ago

Pocket's post about the acquisition, referring to the main value their product brings, says, “a platform where high-quality, thoughtful content and free speech can rise above the rest.” Pocket used to have a feature aimed at surfacing high-quality content from the collection of things a user had already pocketed. They removed that feature. I was paying for their premium service before that change. After they removed it, I stopped the premium subscription because I wasn't sure what pocket's value to me was anymore. Now they have a recommender that recommends things you haven't pocketed yet. But that just encourages the user to accumulate an ever larger collection of pocketed things, not surface the best things in that collection. Ever since, I've reflexively kept saving things to pocket, hoping they would bring that feature back. But the only practical thing I have done with it is pull up something I just saved recently, because it will be near the top of the list. Pocket's CEO also writes, “In fact, we have a few major updates up our sleeves that we are really excited to get into your hands in the coming months.” I hope they will bring that feature, or something with a similar aim, back.

chrido 10y ago
I have similar concerns. I really used Pocket a lot. Two times I got an e-mail at the end of the year that I'm in the top 1% of their users. That was nice! I want distraction free reading which means no social recommendations, sharing and other stuff. Things I would really like is pdf support, x days of reading left, auto scrolling and detailed statistics about my reading. Also cool would be some garbage collection, e.g., news articles are useless to read in 2 weeks but a blog post may be still useful in a few years.
ttam 10y ago
Not only they removed that feature, but they also removed a bunch of other automatic-categories that I used to love (quick reads!) And, as I've described in a blog post I did about Pocket, the recommendation system they created fails in one huge aspect: it is recommending me things that I've seen elsewhere but just decided not to pocket...
dredmorbius 10y ago
OK, so it's not just me imagining things. My view is pretty much as yours: POCKET IS MY VETTED WEB. If I've saved stuff there, it's because that is shit I've already determined is worth a second look, and I want to be able to find it again. Increasingly, when I hit my Pocket archive (3k-4k+ items, top 1% user), I find that I cannot find what I'm looking for. This negates approximately 80% of the purpose of having Pocket in the first place, and I've been giving strong thoughts to simply using it as a link dump until I can figure out how to: 1. Download the content myself. 2. Download the tags, which are the most important element. 3. Get the simplified-Web view. Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. 4. Be able to search and filter specifically what I've already fetched. And filter by more options: date, website, author, tags (positive and negative filters), etc. None of that currently exists. And it is increasingly frustrating.

bravura 10y ago

Can Pocket please finally support Facebook links to non-Facebook context? And just strip the Facebook URL junk? Otherwise, you have to click on a FB link to get the unmangled URL, thus counting against your number of free views every month.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Incognito mode. Or Archive.is

stonogo 10y ago

I will never again donate to the Mozilla Foundation.

callahad 10y ago
Why's that? This acquisition was carried out by the self-funding Mozilla Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation is a separate entity.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and can acquire startups. Mozilla doesn't have the resources to continue with Thunderbird. I am increasingly baffled by their decisions and how they relate to the strategic plans [0] they've been producing for a while. Despite the worthy words in their plan they seem to have no sense of direction. That saddens me. That said I'm happier having Pocket as an open source part of Mozilla/Firefox than a surprise integration of a commercial app. [0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/MoFo_2020 https://wiki.mozilla.org/MoFo_2020

Manishearth 10y ago
I could be wrong here, but the thunderbird thing is basically that it was way too much work for little gain -- the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs. I'm also not sure of this, but that vision thing you link to is focused on the goals of the Foundation proper (excluding MoCo), which is not all of Mozilla, and many of the decisions fall out of that scope.
- M_- 10y ago
  > the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs. No. Thunderbird was built against something that the Mozilla foundation used to tout as the future of building software in general: XUL. And there also was a XULRunner which was to Gecko/Firefox what Electron is to Blink/Chrome: a way to develop native apps using the browser engine as a UI toolkit. The difference with electron is that it was built with more native-apps facilities, like spawning up Wizard dialogs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tutorial/Creating_a_Wizard https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu... All written in their XML. It wasn't developed specifically for Thunderbird. Firefox is also built on top of the same technologies. XULRunner versions were released concurrently with new Firefox versions. The reason why Thunderbird is a dead is because XUL is dead, or rather, will die soon. They are rewriting everything related to UI in Firefox and also terminating the traditional addon API which.. required XUL, in favor of Chrome's addon API. Thunderbird is not the only notable app written in XUL beside Firefox. There's also Miro, Songbird, Google's adwords editor ( https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=e... ) and many others. Most software written in XUL has either been abandoned or going to die, anyway.

vegabook 10y ago

I have no idea what Pocket is, but as a Firefox stalwart and a person looking to learn Rust, the fact that Mozilla is actually acquiring stuff gives me confidence on its financial stability. Very important issue in the decision making process on future technologies to back.

hkmurakami 10y ago

I was shocked to read the news since afaik Mozilla had never made acquisitions like this in the past (which they mention in the post). I'm excited though, since the reason I hadn't used Pocket in the past was because I didn't want to be part of yet another walled garden (YAWG?). A quick look at Crunchbase shows that they'd raised $14.5M from investors. Given Mozilla's ~$300M of annual revenue, I wonder whether this leans towards an acquihire or a technology/product acquisition (definitely not a business acquisition). Difficult for me to assess the significance of 10M users for a company like Mozilla.

tedmiston 10y ago
My general rule of thumb is that if they don't announce a price it's an acquihire.

kensai 10y ago

"save to pocket" :D

niftich 10y ago

Oh, what a twist! In a story that began two years ago with Pocket's integration by Mozilla [1] in Firefox [2], large segments of the userbase spoke out with scathing criticism. This, at first blush, appears unrelated: Mozilla previously announced its Context Graph initiative, which was a bold undertaking to be built partially upon a new and emerging set of W3C standards to take back some of the control over linkage, metadata, and the consumption and annotation of web content [3] from big incumbent providers who run content portals, content silos, or content aggregators (largely the usual suspects, including Google, Facebook [4], Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo [5]). To understand this play, temporarily forget about Mozilla the Foundation, and think about Mozilla as a strategic competitor to the above. In the case of Pocket, a hard-to-deny side effect is that Pocket's presence in Firefox, despite the exact nature of the integration, is likely here to stay. While this is bound to frustrate many, Mozilla's competitors routinely ship software or entire platforms with tight captive integrations, against which competition has proven difficult to mount solely on the merits of values and philosophical purity. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=firefox%20pocket https://hn.algolia.com/?query=firefox%20pocket [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mozilla%20pocket https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mozilla%20pocket [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525#13740110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525#13740110 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375451#13375917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375451#13375917 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493

omouse 10y ago
My only problem with Pocket was that it was proprietary and it was integrated with Firefox. If it's released under and open source license, then I'll be glad to have it integrated. Pocket makes Mozilla competitive on mobile because Firefox's market share on mobile is very low.
- nnethercote 10y ago
  Pocket will be open sourced.
  - 10y ago

throwaway206801 10y ago

Mozilla can spend money on this, but not Thunderbird or XUL-based extensions?

Traubenfuchs 10y ago
It seems we have have been taken to a bizzaro parallel earth where people enjoy built it bloat that should be an addon in their formerly highly customizeable browser.
- rhelmer 10y ago
  The Pocket integration in Firefox is very simple and is in fact a built-in add-on. I think it's a failure of imagination to assume that this is going to be the extent of what Pocket will be able to contribute... they have a lot of users and popular mobile apps for instance which is useful on its own. As the blog post points out, the hope is that Pocket will accelerate the context graph initiative. So, I disagree that it's about "bloat" or customization. In any case, the Pocket add-on is like ~700k and it doesn't do anything if you take it off the toolbar...
rhelmer 10y ago
It's more a question of "won't" rather than "can't". Why do you think XUL and Thunderbird are good investments vs. things like Servo or the context graph initiative (which the Pocket team is going to accelerate according to the blog post)? Do you think a non-standard framework for making fat native apps and a mail client built on this framework are going to make Mozilla more relevant?
- rhelmer 10y ago
  The reason I bring up Servo is that parts of it are already starting to land in Gecko and will ship with Firefox soon - do you think making Servo support XUL is a good use of anyone's time?

justanton 10y ago

How does Mozilla earn money?

zobzu 10y ago
Search engine deals, and now pocket

gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago

Why would someone use pocket over zotero?

lllllll 10y ago
In my case, because it syncs with my Kobo Aura HD ebook reader. That way I can read "my internet" offline :)
mcintyre1994 10y ago
I just searched zotero in the App Store and got nothing, so because every morning I save stuff from Feedly into Pocket and I have no idea how I'd do that with zotero.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
  Did you try googling that?
  - mcintyre1994 10y ago
    Yea, I found their website : https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/ Available for Windows, Mac and Linux. So no mobile apps at all, Pocket apps are great so that's a good reason to choose them over Zotero.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Fair question, and one I'm asking myself increasingly, though: 1. Zotero doesn't have a full-service (or any?) Android app. Which is my primary reading platform. So it's simply not an option. 2. More straightforward onramp. It's pretty easy to figure out what the fuck to do with Pocket, though after a bit, it gets utterly unusable with scale (I've got ~3-4k articles, possibly more, the fact that I can't even extract a !@#$%^&() count is a major PITA, and referencing them Simply Doesn't Work. 3. Simplified and uniform presentation. Web design isn't the solution. Web design is the problem. I prefer Pocket's styling to ANYTHING* any website can throw at me, with exceptions I can count on the fingers of one hand. Most of which I've made myself. Frankly, I'm utterly frustrated with use of the Web as a research and archival tool, and none of the options I've seen yet are satisfactory.

SwellJoe 10y ago

Pocket, for me, is a weird product/feature. I've tried to use it, but it ends up just being like a clumsy bookmarking feature. Allegedly, you can read things offline, but that feature never works for me. It seems the feature for offline reading doesn't exist at all in Firefox (which I'd assumed was the point of its integration, but my assumption was wrong), and I've tried the Chrome desktop app and the Android mobile app ..nothing I save to pocket is ever readable without a data connection. It must work for some content for some people because I see people talking about it like it does. But, without that feature I see literally no utility in Pocket...it's just a clunky bolted-on bookmark manager, and so I end up going back to bookmarks with tags. I use Sync and I have Firefox on all of my devices. So, my bookmarks go with me. So, I guess it's good that it's going open source. I wasn't comfortable with the way integration was presented back when they added it...it wasn't at all apparent, to me, that Pocket was a third party for-profit entity when the "setup your pocket" process launched in Firefox, since I'd never heard of it before that. But, it still seems like a solution looking for a problem. I'll give it another look. Maybe I was just unlucky with my choices of what to save...but it seems like if offline reading is not going to work on a page (for whatever reason) it should warn you. It'd suck to get on a train/plane or get lost in the woods, with plans to catch up on some reading, only to find there's nothing there. But, maybe that's not even the primary purpose of Pocket? I dunno, it's still pretty fuzzy to me wtf it's for, if not that.

sharkbot 10y ago
The Kobo ereaders have had Pocket integration for a while now, and it works great offline. My usual routine is to find interesting articles on Hacker News, and if they are longer than a page or two, click the Pocket button and read them at home on the ereader. A few don't render well (the article on Arrival/Story of your Life not being a time-travel story was a recent fail), but generally it works great.
- padraic7a 10y ago
  I love this feature. My only concern was being tied into Pocket and wondering what might happen to the company. I imagine that being acquired by Mozilla makes that future a bit more secure.

DanCarvajal 10y ago

Two apps I no longer use because they became bloated and unfocused, they deserve each other

cpeterso 10y ago

The Firefox bug to open source Pocket: https://bugzil.la/open-pocket https://bugzil.la/open-pocket

zyngaro 10y ago

"We believe that the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content is key to keeping the internet healthy by fighting against the rising tide of centralization and walled gardens" that alone is a reason to welcome this aquisition. Facebook has become for many, me included the entry point to the web much more so than the browser and I really don't like that. I can imagine Mozilla suggest content to users based in what they have saved in the past on pocket and integration with Firefox. Nice move.

hkmurakami 10y ago
I suppose then that the strategy will be "the browser as a platform" vs "FB as a platform", with the technical difference that all FF tools will be open source? That actually sounds promising. Next logical content vertical would be video then (judging from FB's content importance)

dochtman 10y ago

I'll keep saying that Mozilla should acquire Fastmail. Now that would be a strategic acquisition.

morganvachon 10y ago
Please, no. I think part of the reason Fastmail has been able to focus on the user experience is because they are independent. I don't want them acquired, disbanded, and dumped. It's the best paid service I've ever used.
gkoberger 10y ago
There's a joke at Mozilla that "Opera did it first". Pretty much every new feature in Firefox, Chrome, etc has appeared first in Opera. In this case: https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/opera-fastmail/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/opera-fastmail/
- toxican 10y ago
  Funny how far Opera has fallen these past few years. Years ago it was setting trends with tabs. Now it's yet another Chromium-based browser.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

AJRF 10y ago

I was wishing Pocket would offer AWS Polly playback for articles, so I started making my own app to do it. Now that it is going open source I might just piggy back their parser as its a good bit better than mine. Hope they build in some Context Graph projects into Pocket, as there is some great ideas their.

justin_vanw 10y ago

Synergy: One product that nobody uses is now bundled with another one.

wirddin 10y ago

Huge fan of the Pocket App. Any guesses for how much the deal would be worth?

phs 10y ago

I've been lately dissatisfied with pocket and related apps for lacking some admittedly fringe features. The possibility of adding them myself without rebuilding the whole app is exciting!

Roritharr 10y ago

After this, why should I donate to Mozilla? I really don't get what's the difference between donating to Mozilla and donating to Facebook. Facebook open-sources some of their stuff. Facebook buys companies to generate revenues... I guess Mozilla doesn't need help anymore.

Vinnl 10y ago
Mozilla open sources everything, and has an open Internet as its mission? I'd trust them to do that with Pocket far more than Facebook with... Facebook.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
I don't understand your point. Are you upset they bought Pocket?
- ajasmin 10y ago
  Mozilla's donation page says: We are proudly non-profit, non-corporate. I don't know the ins and out of Mozilla dual identity as a foundation/corporation. But it'd be unsettling to learn that part of your donations to an open-source project is financing a corporate acquisition.
callahad 10y ago
Donations to "Mozilla" go to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which does exceptional, meaningful work. Firefox is developed by the Foundation's self-funding, for-profit subsidary, the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo). MoCo acquired Pocket, using its own funds. For legal / tax reasons, MoCo can only push a tiny fraction of its revenue up into the Foundation. This means that donations are necessary to sustain the Foundation's initiatives.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  I feel like sufficiently large numbers of people are confused about the arrangement of the company and the foundation (I definitely don't know the details of the money flow between the two), that this warrants some kind of easily referable page on Mozilla's website. (appreciate you clarifying this here)

bttf 10y ago

I have been working on a prototype for a competitor to Pocket and other save-for-later services with an emphasis on minimalism, privacy and ease of use. https://slushi.es https://slushi.es Very early app, features are rolling out daily. My end goal is to build a recommendation engine out of user data, while keeping things anonymous. Although social bookmarking has been done plenty times before, I think execution has been sub-par in previous solutions. My aim is to make things streamlined and fast for the user to go from 'what was that link?' to 'there it is' (sidenote: check out slushi.es opensearch, and how it behaves when there's one result (only works for signed-in users)). A complaint I hear often from Pocket users (and other save-for-later users alike) is that they will save 100s of links without ever going back to reading them. I, too, shared the same sentiment until one day I experienced a 'what was that link again?' moment. It was rare and fleeting at the time, but since using slushi.es more and more, those moments have appeared with increasing frequency. I believe the best save-for-later app will transform the regular web browsing individual's habits of reading an article and forgetting about it, to reading an article and remembering it later; either a day later, a month later, or perhaps years. The thing is remembering. I think a good save-for-later app works as a memory reinforcer; something that augments your ability to build and recall knowledge.

threatofrain 10y ago
I'd be curious to see an organization scheme other than just tags, as I suspect that it leads to difficult to trim (potentially always climbing up) bloat and cognitive load.
- bttf 10y ago
  interesting point. tags have been a feature we have not added yet partly because they seem slightly superfluous. the user is able to search across titles, descriptions, URLs, and can curate links with lists. not sure if tags can provide any extra value
  - UnfalseDesign 10y ago
    If your goal is to create a service that's main feature is content discoverability, I would think that tags are essential. It would provide you with great metrics for knowing what the user prefers. For instance, "They tend to tag lots of funny stories on Saturday. The tag tech news on Monday and Tuesday. They tag movie news on Thursday." Your recommendation engine would then be able to suggest articles to them. "Other users have tagged these stories as tech news and it is Monday. Here's your Monday feed!" I'm not saying you can't make a working product without them. I'm simply saying you probably can't make a competitive product without them.

djhworld 10y ago

I use Instapaper on a daily basis, how does Pocket compare?

yla92 10y ago
Nowadays, I add an article to both Instapaper and Pocket. I used to use Pocket a lot but sticking on Instapaper more. Things I love about Pocket are - Curated (and from other people I followed) "recommendations", - tags "Best Of", "Quick Reads". - beautiful android app Instapaper has less features than Pocket but I find that - Instapaper article parser is better, - UI is cleaner, highlights ( I love these!), - ability to switch style (type faces, article background) - speed read - they also have "Browse" (something similar to Pocket's recommendation?) but in Android app, it's a bit hidden in the drawer menu so I don't use it often.
bartvk 10y ago
Pocket has clients on more exotic platforms, such as the Kobo eReaders.
ikurei 10y ago
These are the most salient differences in my experience with both: - Apart from saving the parsed, "readable" version of an article, it can also save the web as-it-is. This is very useful for those times when the formatting is important (as it is in articles that include code; you loose syntax-highlighting with the readable view. Pocket can be set to try and choose the best view for each article. - It does a great job with videos. - It uses tags instead of folders. - Instapaper has been less reliable for me (specially the android app), although in fairness I've used it more, so I'd notice it's unreliability more often. I'm not that interested in recommendations, but I gotta admit that the few times I've looked at them, Pocket's recommendations were fairly good. I've been using Instapaper for around two years now, keeping Pocket as a bag of less-important links, not-really-reading-material, and very often video. I was thinking of going back to Pocket as my main read-it-later service, specially for the first feature I mentioned. It being Mozilla-owned and some day also OSS will surely be a further advantage in my mind.

hitlin37 10y ago

this is really great news. i like pocket integration on kobo aura one. i hope they keep making that integration improvements further.

dewiz 10y ago

When they add ML clustering to one's pages, so that I stop using bookmarks, and find useful stuff automatically grouped together, plus recommendations...then perhaps I'll start using it

gnicholas 10y ago

I use Pocket differently than most people here. I never save articles to Pocket — I just use their Recommended engine to find interesting articles to read. Some of these come from sources I regularly read (NYT), but others come from obscure sources or big sources that I tend not to read for whatever reason. In a small way, it helps me get news from outside my bubble, and sometimes I'll end up reading regularly from a source I discover through Pocket. My only complaint is that a large portion of the Recommended content is junk from Business Insider. Hopefully this will wane as Mozilla's priorities are implemented.

dredmorbius 10y ago
The ability to blacklist sources would be fucking awesome. I'm mostly limited to firewalling domains at my router. Doesn't stop them from turning up on, e.g., Web search.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

It sounds like a good plan, making Firefox a platform for organizing information while web browsing, research, etc. A question: what advantages privacy-wise does Firefox have over Safari on iPad and macOS? I frequently delete all cookies on Safari and set strong privacy options. I ask because I have transitioned in the last year or so to working on my iPad and MacBook, largely letting my Linux boxes collect dust. On Linux, using Firefox was an easy decision. On iPad and MacBook, Safari is more convenient.

manigandham 10y ago

This will give them plenty of data for their ad network, which is a nice strategic move. They always claimed to be privacy conscious so this is perhaps a nicer way to get interest and behavior information.

manigandham 10y ago
Interesting that people think Mozilla either isn't or is against being an ad network... every single attempt to do adblocking/protection ends up being an ad network eventually (if there's a corporation behind it).
rhelmer 10y ago
I'm not sure which ad network you mean - there was an effort to serve ads on the new-tab "tiles" page but that was shut down a little over a year ago: https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/12/04/advancing-content/ https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/12/04/advanci...

no_wizard 10y ago

I never used pocket, but I use instapaper. I wonder if Pocket will be completely free now or if mozilla counts on this to fund more of its efforts. Beyond that. I also wonder if this means a read it later service will finally properly support RSS. Forgive me I don't know the features of pocket but as i understand it is does not correct? I been using the built in firefox RSS feeder for years. with pocket integration it'd be a lot more useful.

ptrptr 10y ago

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po... explanation for this move is very laconic IMO. What are benefits? We already know majority of user were against even basic integration with pocket.

jrcii 10y ago

To me, Pocket is one of those cluttery icons I need to move off of the toolbar when I setup a new copy of Firefox for someone. If I did want that functionality, which I don't, I'd use an extension called Scrapbook.

Proven 10y ago

Screw Mozilla and their data mining BS. I've been thinking of finding a self-hosted alternative to Pocket and now I want to hurry up. Anybody knows of any self-hosted alternatives?

idlewords 10y ago

Ahahahahaha

rocky1138 10y ago

If you're interested in using Pocket in Chrome/Chromium but aren't ready to hand over the insane amount of permissions required for their official extension, you can run the Add to Pocket (mini) extension. https://johnrockefeller.net/use-pocket-without-being-tracked/ https://johnrockefeller.net/use-pocket-without-being-tracked...

adultSwim 10y ago

I think this is great. I'm weary of add-ons/extensions so only run a couple (which are from providers I trust) I didn't really trust my saved article data to a random startup. Being under Mozilla means now I'll actually use it.

ttam 10y ago

Dear Mozilla, I'd love to help out with Pocket. As a concerned user, I even wrote this a few months ago http://constantbetasoftware.com/2016/09/02/pocket.html http://constantbetasoftware.com/2016/09/02/pocket.html How can I apply?

hkmurakami 10y ago
Well there's a Mozilla employee posting in this discussion thread, so you might start by reaching out to him. He'll likely have some suggestions.
callahad 10y ago
Pocket is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Corporation, so Pocket retains a great deal of autonomy within their organization. Since Mozilla acquired the entire team, I'd start by reaching out to the individuals listed on https://getpocket.com/about/ https://getpocket.com/about/. Longer term, my understanding is that we want to use Pocket's expertise and data to help build a recommendation engine for the open Web (Context Graph: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Context_Graph https://wiki.mozilla.org/Context_Graph). This speaks directly to the problem of sites like Instagram which restrict links to external sites: users can enter via URLs, but they can't navigate away. (More reading: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blogfather-facebook-instagram-and-twitter-are-killing-the-web https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blo...). If anything could help users route themselves out of these silos, it'd be a huge win for the openness of the Web.
- just_testing 10y ago
  Thanks, I'll try to get in touch with them. I'd love to help on the recommendation engine. I'm (for two years now) at the top 1% of users. I also happen to live in Brazil, to be a native portuguese speaker and the recommendation system absolutely sucks. I get a lot of articles regarding startups and Trump, but absolutely nothing in portuguese and/or about Brazil.

TekMol 10y ago

Mozilla has the resources to buy companies. But not the resources to make videos play smoothly. 2017 and Firefox has no hardware accelerated video playback on Linux. Every time I read about something Mozilla does, I am reminded of this xkcd comic from 2013: https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/

1wheel 10y ago

I hope they'll remove some of the "growth-hacker" stuff from the chrome extension. Modifying the new tab page and injecting links on pages by default is super annoying.

codeisawesome 10y ago

I LOVE POCKET! I'm only very happy to hear that it's Mozilla who has bought them. Warm feelings of security and privacy.

prirun 10y ago

They're losing their Yahoo search money in the future and need to make it up somehow.

bharani_m 10y ago

This is an interesting development. I am curious to see how they take this integration forward. Specifically, I have questions whether it will still have a Premium component or will it be made completely open-source. For those interested in an alternative, I am currently building a simpler bookmarking tool [1] that works pretty much exactly like Pocket or Instapaper. Email This will extract useful content from a page and send it to you via email instead of you having to download an additional app or login to another service to access your bookmarks. [1] https://www.emailthis.me https://www.emailthis.me

dredmorbius 10y ago

I hope this is good news. I've been using Pocket for a couple of years, and am a top-1% user. It's been useful, though also highly frustrating, and is at best only about a 50% solution. I've provided considerable feedback to Pocket over issues and features. Over the course of a couple of years, few if any of them appear to be addressed, which has been highly disheartening. (Any Pocket folk: I'm "dredmorbius" at gmail, though not in my account, which is otherwise attributed, because, you know, privacy, Kristalnacht, Snowden, etc., etc.) I'd previously used Readability, which was nice in fixing a primary problem of online content: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. But that service shut down, on 30 days notice (though with loud signs for the previous couple of years) last September. I spent several days largely manually transferring information out of Readability (404 links meant that a straight export wasn't useful -- I had to track down alternative references where possible). I'm hoping I don't have to go through that again. I've looked at other alternatives: Instapaper (no compelling use case), Pinboard.in, by our very own @idlewords (his comment below was ... not particularly useful). Upshot: without a very specific walkthrough of the product, I can't tell if it's worth my time, and my time would be a week or month of trying to reconstruct the structure I already have in Pocket, in Pinboard. I've visited the "Tour" link multiple times, and no, it isn't clear that this offers me anything useful. I'm thinking that RMS's model of having an email-based web-requesting systsem might actually be more useful than anything else. A Mutt (or Emacs mail-mode) searchable, taggable archive, date-sorted, threadable/groupable, would be a huge win over a lot of other alternatives. I've been thinking through other ways in which I might create my own self-hosted archive repository. Zotero is another option, though again, I can't quite penetrate the use model / workflow. In both cases, the prospect of being stuck with as-published layouts rather than as-useful layouts (have I mentioned: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem) is disheartening. I'd really like to have an offline / commandline tool which could manage webpage decrufting. I'm aware that it's not a fully deterministic process -- the problem with the Web, for better or worse (I've been suspecting the latter for some time) is that there are no publishing standards, and content follows no consistent form. That said, much content can be divided into two general categories: 1) known states of fucked up and 2) unknown states of fucked up. Growing the size of category one, and taking the hopeless cases and simply stripping all markup from it and starting from scratch (something I do myself, manually, far more often than I care to think) is a semi-reasonable approach. I've written a few times on what's plaguing the Web (as have others, Maciej's rants are particulalry recommended). Tabbed browsing: a band-aid: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_... The Reference Management Problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/50o1jv/the_references_management_problem_readability/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/50o1jv/the_ref... And some general feedback (wrapped around some specific feedback) to Pocket: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/3eucmp_s0tumjuoxmfclbw https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/3eucmp_s0tumjuoxmfclbw (Yes, it's heavy on the caps and asterisks -- it's difficult otherwise to indicate important points in email. SoKookMeHarder...) Borrowing from that last: Don't put solving your own problems ahead of solving those of your users. The features I do use, heavily, and would like to see improved, are article view (many websites remain glitchy, I'm well aware this is a whackamole problem, but it does need to be continually addressed), import (I've been working through a backlog of 2,000+ Readability articles migrating to Pocket, slowly, one-at-a-time, there's no automated tool), bulk-action tools, sub-corpus tools (working on a specific set of articles at a time), and tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags (did I say tags) tags tags tags. And more tags. A principle, perhaps the principle problem with the Web as it stands is organisation particularly as concerns quality and vetted content. There are various sources who can vet content. Some are good. There's one I especially trust, and whose judgement over what I like is strong: ME. I've commented before, AND CONTINUE TO HUGELY APPRECIATE several features of Pocket, especially the ability to peform full-text searches of my current and archived articles. It's HUGE. One of my (many) interests is COGNITIVE LOAD. Pocket is a tool for REDUCING COGNITIVE LOAD when reading online media. I see several mechanisms: 1. A standardised presentation of Web content. I can look at an article, and identify what is the primary content (virtually all of it), what's metadata (usually the top -- you do a good job but I'd love to see this improved as well), and where the controls are (standard Pocket bits). 2. Elimination of online distractions. Sidebars. Ads. Animations. Videos. Spurious links. Shitty page layout. Shitty font choices. Shitty colour choices. Shitty CSS choices. 3. Format optimised for my device and preferences. I love you to tears for not having to fuck with zoom, font choices, background/foreground colour, etc., etc., etc., on Every Fucking Webpage. ("Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem.") Huge. Or is that "Hyuuuuge!" now? 4. My own curation. Anything I've saved to Pocket I've seen at least once. There's a familiarity in returning to material which makes it more valuable. 5. Tags. Again, my assigned classifications for material. (And often picks selected from Pocket's tag suggestions, which are quite good.)

leopld 10y ago

I think it would be great if they looked into merging the existing bookmarks system with Pocket!

nkkollaw 10y ago

My impression is that most things that Mozilla starts, they shut down. I was following their experiments, and they shut all of them down while some of them were already working. I used to use Thunderbird years ago, but they completely stopped working on it. I just hope they don't kill Pocket, since I use it every day to save things to read later.

itsjamesfoster 10y ago

that's great

jslakro 10y ago

Yeah! At last I can change Feedly! Any advice before migrating?

KarlFreeman 10y ago

It's fairly early stage but I've been actively building an alternative to Pocket called Filltray (https://filltray.com https://filltray.com). I found myself being overwhelmed by products like Pocket/Instapaper so wanted to build something different. A place to keep things for "short" periods of time but without the baggage of having 100s of items permanently on your never-ending reading list. A "do-later" place that may or might not come around. A couple months ago I put up a public roadmap (https://medium.com/filltray/public-product-roadmap-3964c3fa4398 https://medium.com/filltray/public-product-roadmap-3964c3fa4...) and I'm continuing to work hard to produce a product which meets mine — and I think others — needs for a rethink on read-later. Please feel free to follow @filltray to keep up to date with my progress :)!

vivekd 10y ago

I use pocket because it is automatically synced with my Kobo e-reader. One thing I wish they would offer is folders. Before I bought the kobo I stuck with instapaper just because of the cleaner interface and the option to use folders. I get that pocket offers the option to tag, but different people have different preferences and folders would be nice. Also a bunch of large squares doesn't seem to be the best way to organize information consisting of web blogs and pictures. Hopefully mozilla will make some UX changes to pocket.

SZJX 10y ago

Seems that the user data/behavioral patterns is really always the most important thing for this type of services huh? The aim was mostly to get acquired and it seems that the acquirer always has an eye on the vast amount of data etc.