17 ms·
The next ten years of Instapaper
- jseliger 8y agoI subscribed. I don't need the premium features, but I also use Instapaper just about every day and want the company to survive.
- chmars 8y agoSame here. I don't even dare that by paying for a premium subscription, I lost my 6-month trial period …
- drrob 8y agoAs a UK user it's just nice to finally have it back. Good to know things are still going swimmingly despite the GDPR setbacks.
- lkurusa 8y agoGood to see the 6 months Premium for EU users, but I am still unconvinced; I switched to Pocket after the GDPR fiasco, is there any reason to switch back?
- heavymark 8y agoDepends on if you are happier with Pocket than Instapaper. I think the Pocket UI is rather awful compared to Instapaper, but if it works at least as well or better for you, then of course no reason to switch back.
- princetman 8y agoI’m in a same boat. I already paid for Pocket premium. There is no compelling reason to go back. I did prefer Instapaper app UX though. Probably coz of years of use, but I’ve made my peace with Pocket app. GDPR blackout was a big misstep.
- pembrook 8y agoIt’s clear that Pinterest management was behind the GDPR fiasco, and now that Instapaper is independent again, they’re trying to make it right. To me it’s a better product than pocket, reason enough for me to switch back.
- castlegloom 8y agoThe comment section of the announcement has plenty of Pocket-switchers. I think Instapaper is much more focused than Pocket, which seems to be more geared towards recommendations now.
- cube2222 8y agoWhy do you think it's a better product? (Not a user of any of them)
- chmars 8y agoHow's the privacy record of Pocket? At first sight, https://getpocket.com/privacy https://getpocket.com/privacy doesn't look GDPR-compliant. It doesn't mention rights of the data subject, there's no address of a data protection representative in the EU and so on … In addition, Read It Later Inc. is apparently not Privacy Shield-certified – the don't mention it and I cannot find their entry at https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant_search https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant_search. To be fair, https://www.instapaper.com/privacy https://www.instapaper.com/privacy includes some GDPR-related information, however, they don't have a data privacy representative in the EU or a Privacy Shield certification either.
- charlietango592 8y agoDo they expect to have any EU user after being out 2 months? I've been chatting with the support and I heard only the classic "soon".
- qn0x 8y agoFunnily enough while the web service was unavailable to EU users (myself included) their Android app worked just fine for me.
- jplayer01 8y agoAre you sure? While I had access to old articles on my iOS app, I wasn't able to add new ones, something I hadn't noticed until weeks later.
- chmars 8y agoThe app and website have been working for me. Geoblocking is obviously not that easy …
- canuckintime 8y agoMeanwhile, Instapaper just killed their Apple Watch app: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/08/03/instapaper-apple-watch-app-removal/ http://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/08/03/instapaper-apple-wat...
- heavymark 8y agoI can't imagine any significant number of people were using it to justify keeping it, but perhaps I'm wrong.
- canuckintime 8y agoWhen Instapaper removes Apple Watch support it deletes the app from the watch of everyone who installed the iPhone app update.
- midnightmonster 8y agoIt didn’t work very well and just tended to get in the way when using playlists. The only third party watch app I use happily is OmniFocus, and it’s so nice in some ways that I’ve learned to live with it’s also-very-obvious bugs.
- canuckintime 8y agoI have a cellular Apple Watch and need third party apps to be available if I'm going to leave my phone at home even occasionally. Unfortunately major developers are dropping Apple Watch support in droves: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/04/04/instagram-removes-watch-app/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/04/04/instagram-removes-watch-a...
- chmars 8y agoUsers too – and developers are following suit, except for some special use cases … (Unfortunately, useful notifications for iPhone apps depend on an Apple Watch app.)
- q-base 8y agoI would have loved/expected a short explanation as to why GDPR compliance took so long to achieve. I really love Instapaper and use it a lot. Especially the send to kindle feature. Luckily for them I did not stumble upon an easy 1:1 replacement. But not even explaining the challenges seems quite a bit off and suspect. It is not like I keep my health records there (at least to my knowledge :) )
- TillE 8y agoYeah, they refused to say anything during the outage, and now they're still not providing the slightest bit of detail. There's really no excuse for that. With that total lack of transparency, I certainly wouldn't trust Instapaper in the future.
- masklinn 8y ago> I really love Instapaper and use it a lot. Especially the send to kindle feature. Luckily for them I did not stumble upon an easy 1:1 replacement. I finally gave up a few weeks back and migrated to pocket, turns out it has an importer for instapaper's CSV export, so it took about 5mn and it worked well enough for my purposes (saving articles from my twitter feed and new chapters of serials from feedly for later reading), so meh.
- q-base 8y agoI looked at Pocket as well, but the "send to Kindle" feature seemed to be missing?
- masklinn 8y agoAh that's possible, I don't have a kindle so that's not a thing I would be using.
- r3bl 8y agoYeah, it's not implemented. There's P2K[0] and crofflr[1] that act as middleware between Pocket and Kindle. [0] $3 per month subscription https://p2k.co/ https://p2k.co/ [1] $5 one time payment https://www.crofflr.com/#/home https://www.crofflr.com/#/home
- _susanoo 8y agoStraight from their privacy policy [0]: -- Please note: To ensure easy account creation, minimal customer errors, and reduced support inquiries, Instapaper accounts initially do not have passwords. If left without a password, anyone can access your account if they know or guess your username. -- This sounds like a serious security issue if you ask me. [0] = https://www.instapaper.com/privacy https://www.instapaper.com/privacy
- bthdonohue 8y agoHey there – we started requiring passwords many years ago, but the service originally launched without requiring a password or email address. You can read more about it here: http://blog.instapaper.com/post/2318776738 http://blog.instapaper.com/post/2318776738
- _susanoo 8y agoI'm not sure how requiring a minimum password length of 1 character solves anything. Just tried it out and apparently 'a' is an acceptable password. The article hammers on accessiblity over security and I think you've taken this too far. A minimum password length of 8 is not a 'strange requirement'.
- diminoten 8y agoPassword requirements don't really protect the business, they protect the user, and if the user isn't interested in protecting their data, why should the company force them to care?
- _frog 8y agoIt feels weird to me that they’re putting those monetisation hooks back in without talking at all about the future of the product. I’ve used Instapaper for many years now, and I’m more than happy to pay for a service that I get so much value out of, but that said, Instapaper’s largely stagnated in recent years, with very little in the way of major updates or improvements. I’d really love to see even a rough roadmap that could give me some idea of where they want to be say, a year from now, but right now I don’t have a ton of confidence.
- henryaj 8y agoYeah, I don't see anything about "the next ten years" in there (other than that it will involve people paying money).
- austenallred 8y agoSometimes the most important part of “the next ten years” is continuing to exist
- tptacek 8y agoWhy do you want major updates and improvements? Are you a customer of Instapaper's, or an investor hoping your dollars today pay off in a much better product later? A thing I like about the service I use is that it doesn't add major new things regularly; it just does the thing I ask it to do and gets out of the way.
- bloodorange 8y agoUnfortunately, though this might be the view of some (or many) users, the organisation which provides the product - if profit driven - can not maintain the 'development' level of staffing just for maintenance and likewise the valuation also changes if they are only in maintenance mode. So, it is not realistic to expect that they'll not do much. Ultimately, this is the bane of a consumption drive society.
- wpietri 8y agoI'm in the same category. They said the plan is to "ensure Instapaper can continue for the foreseeable future", which is all the feature I need. I could believe they will think of other things I want besides continuing to work well. But I don't want them to feel like they have to be on a feature treadmill.
- henryaj 8y agoAre there any decent alternatives to Instapaper? Pocket is the obvious one, but doesn't have highlights (which I rely on).
- henryaj 8y agoLooks like I'm wrong - Pocket does have (freemium) highlights: https://getpocket.com/blog/2018/04/highlights-are-now-available-on-iphone-and-ipad/ https://getpocket.com/blog/2018/04/highlights-are-now-availa...
- boramalper 8y agoUp to three per article though…
- r3bl 8y agoWallabag: https://www.wallabag.it/en https://www.wallabag.it/en (Link to the hosted version, change .it to .org if you prefer to self-host.) It contains highlighting, send-to-Kindle, decent mobile apps, and all the other features you would usually rely on! Feature-wise, no alternative compares to it. The only problem: UI. It's not the UX (things are where you expect them to be), but UI just looks... wrong. The same thing applies to their website(s) as well.
- corobo 8y agoI had a look into it while Instapaper was down and couldn't find any send-to-Kindle feature - do you know where that's mentioned at all?
- superlopuh 8y agohttps://github.com/cekage/wallindle https://github.com/cekage/wallindle Needs a jailbroken Kindle...
- corobo 8y ago
- subbz 8y agoAfter all these comments stating that they changed to Pocket I find it important to point out we also have an self-hosted and open source alternative to these 2: Wallabag (https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.org/en) Unfortunately it's very hard to set Wallabag up without having access to VirtualHosts.
- o_____________o 8y agoSlim the server down so it fits on a lambda and include a serverless definition to set it up in one line: https://github.com/serverless/serverless https://github.com/serverless/serverless
- aniket12 8y agoFor someone who only wants a free service, which is better - Pocket or Instapaper?
- bovermyer 8y agoThat depends on your use case. Personally, I like the UX of Instapaper better - it's cleaner, more minimalist, and easier to read.
- ReverseCold 8y agoPocket is owned by Mozilla. Instapaper is (was?) owned by Pinterest. (I think the choice is obvious :D) Ideally though, you can host your own FOSS solution on a raspberry pi or something. (Wallabag)
- pwinnski 8y agoInstapaper is owned by the two people who signed this post. For 21 days now.
- sidcool 8y agoDid I miss something or was there no mention of the plans for the next ten years?
- theDoug 8y agoYou are correct. So the plan seems that they are hoping up to $350 in revenue per Premium user over that ten year span will cover it. Which seems …low.
- jakobegger 8y ago35$ per user per year is pretty decent for a low touch app like Instapaper. At that rate, they need just a few thousand subscribers per developer. I don't know how big their team is, and where they work / what kind of salary they pay themselves, and I have no clue how many users they have, but I'm pretty sure there are ways to make the math work out.
- anotheryou 8y agoso full text search is payed again. i love that feature, but it's not worth 30 bucks a year to me.
- drexlspivey 8y agoI switched to emailthis after the EU fiasco. https://www.emailthis.me/ https://www.emailthis.me/ You get a parsed html email with the article without the adds. It literally supports every app there is for saving (you just share via email). You can read it from any email client and easily share it with your friends. I also use fastmail which has a great full text search so finding old articles is a breeze. You can also do many cool stuff with IFTTT because again, it's just email.
- andrei_says_ 8y agoWhat about images?
- drexlspivey 8y agoImages are included, not video though.
- skiman10 8y agoWell this is kind of annoying. They gave out premium to everyone when Pinterest bought them, but now that they are a private company again they took away features from me that I was used to using as a free user. I get why, but it still rubs me the wrong way. Reminds me of the PushBullet monetization stuff[0]. [0] https://blog.pushbullet.com/2015/11/17/introducing-pushbullet-pro/ https://blog.pushbullet.com/2015/11/17/introducing-pushbulle...
- jakobegger 8y agoSince they don't seem to bother actually sharing their ten year plan, let me share what I want their ten year plan to be: - We're planning no new user visible features. Instapaper will continue to work just the way you've grown to like it, and we're not planning to change stuff around. - We're working on making text extraction even more reliable. Besides blog posts and news articles, we hope to improve text extraction from PDFs, slide decks or even twitter threads. Whatever textual content you find on the web, with Instapaper you can save it for distraction free reading, now or later. - Our apps will see ongoing development to improve compatibility (eg. support new devices/OS updates as they come out), but no major new features. Quality assurance will be our top priority. - and last but not least, our goal is to establish a small, but profitable company to keep the project alive! Besides the technical aspects, our new business plan will make sure that we're thinking ahead and that we're never caught off guard by something like the GDPR again.
- anotherevan 8y ago- Will work with ereader manufacturers to allow them to use Instapaper (like Pocket works on Kobo).
- AJRF 8y agoRead-it-later software seems surprisingly hard to monetize given how few are in the space. Pocket, Instapaper and Pinboard seem to be the only valid players. The ability to facilitate "archiving a webpage" seems to be simple, but read-it-later software needs to be more than that to the modern internet user it seems. It needs to; + Save video and images + Most people require a TTS service of sorts + Even more people want text-extraction (and boy-oh-boy this is hard) + Cross-platform apps & syncing Where are the big costs here? Is it; 1. Scale (Syncing all that multimedia must be expensive) 2. Talent (doubt it's this all the teams seem to be extremely small teams) 3. AI & Scraping development (Most services are poor in their offerings here, not sure its this) I've been thinking about the space a LOT and started to try and develop some pieces of software that eventually I hope people will be able to stitch together into something great. When i've observed problems like this before it seems that eventually a large open source project comes along and kills the markets chance of generating any money, and read-it-later services seem to fit in that fuzzily-defined-in-my-head-only market segment.
- jazzdog 8y agoHow about making it anything less than painful to use on an iPad. Like, maybe some of your developers can actually try to use it on an iPad? If this has been fixed, I retract. I've moved on long ago.
- antjanus 8y agoCan someone compare Instapaper to Pocket for me? I'm just wondering how they're different.