7 ms·
The relationship between Readability and Instapaper
- jphackworth 15y agoI love Instapaper, but it's especially interesting that Marco has been able to compete against larger groups like Readability and Apple's Reading List. I'm afraid it might be inevitable that he gets swamped by a constant stream of competitive features, unless Instapaper expands beyond 1 employee.
- omfg 15y agoBut if it's just a 1 person company he can afford to stay small and still be highly profitable. Additionally Readability has stated that they're still figuring out their business model, where as Marco has had a steady income for a long time now. It's entirely possible that Readability vanishes in a few years and Instapaper is still around.
- kennywinker 15y agoAgreed. From a casual observer's perspective Readability seems to have failed at a good idea and is now switching direction with no clear goal. Evernote, however, has a pretty clear business model.
- kennywinker 15y agoWhat evidence do you see that being a one-man operation is hurting his business? As far as I can tell Instapaper is still leading the field in features and quality...
- MaxGabriel 15y agoAs far as Apple goes, I think Marco's predictions are correct. First, Apple will never compete on a feature by feature basis because that would add too much complexity, and they'll be constrained unless they make a native app. Second, Apple's reading list has made me realize how much I can benefit from instapaper's important features like offline reading and footnote handling. edit: Here's Marco's original article about Apple's Reading list http://www.marco.org/2011/04/30/lion-safari-reading-list http://www.marco.org/2011/04/30/lion-safari-reading-list
- tszming 15y agoI might be wrong, but isn't Instapaper is using the Readability's technology to process HTML and make it more readable? (http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs-readability/ http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs-readability/).
- Xuzz 15y agoNo, it uses a custom scraper written by Marco. I've found that both of them work better on some pages and worse on others. (However, I do believe the "Safari Reader" feature of iOS 5 and Safari 5 does use Readability to extract the contents.)
- kennywinker 15y agoThe "Reader" button appears to be a fork of Readability (http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/08/think-safari-reader-looks-familiar-thats-because-apple-used-op/ http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/08/think-safari-re...) Also of note, the original Readability was actually "partly inspired by" instapaper (http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/02/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/02/readability/)
- nikcub 15y agoSo I looked into all of these some time ago for an app that I use myself. The Safari fork of Readability is the best client implementation, while the best server-side implementation (by a mile) is Diffbot. Out of the 50 sources I had (regular RSS updates, etc.) InstaPaper failed on far too many, either stripping important content or pictures and captions. Readability was only a bit better I glued together an app that will pull in RSS, send each URL to diffbot, and then collate the output into a reader that I use. Never thought of releasing it as an app, I just use it myself.
- tszming 15y agoReadability's code is a little bit old (2009), but seems no other better (opensource) alternatives... And thanks for suggesting Diffbot, will try later.
- feir 15y agoA lot of imaginations among the announcements between Instapaper and Readability.
- ChrisArchitect 15y agowow, and this didn't even touch on Evernote's Clearly. Busy day in the 'easy mobile reading' space.
- abrowne 15y agoWhich appears to be derived from Readable[1], based on how the reading view slides over the page and some comments in the extension's js files. [1]: http://readable.tastefulwords.com/ http://readable.tastefulwords.com/
- ronnier 15y agoThe reason I don't develop my ViewText any further is that the barrier to entry for this is just to low. Marco already has an excellent app, now reability will enter his market, along with Apple. Here's an example: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marco.org%2F2011%2F11%2F16%2Freadability&format= http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marco.org%2...
- jorde 15y agoViewText is really good. If you have stopped development, why not dump the code to GitHub? Open source community could use a good text extractor as most of the current ones are pretty bad on server side and Readability's old code requires browser components to work well.
- llimllib 15y agoI guess it's weird that I often instapaper pages I've readability-ed?
- berberich 15y agoI do the same thing, usually with multi-page articles, since Readability will stitch pages into one long one before I save to Instapaper.
- joeguilmette 15y agoInstapaper automagically stitches paginated articles together.
- rkudeshi 15y agoNo, it doesn't. http://www.marco.org/2011/07/19/siracusa-multipage http://www.marco.org/2011/07/19/siracusa-multipage
- joeguilmette 15y agoso it does. holy shit. i wonder how many articles I've only read a piece of because I thought Instapaper was stitching!
- lyso 15y agoExactly. It is a problem - I respect that Marco doesn't want to stich articles together, but I sometimes reach the end of an article to find myself unsure as to whether that really was the end, or just the end of page one. Would be useful to get some indication in Instapaper when this is the case. I am flirting with Readability for this reason.
- berberich 15y agoOne Chrome (and Safari) extension that I found helps is called Page One [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pojkjlgamiogkhagabbejodnkcnnbfdb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pojkjlgamiogkhagab...]. It will automatically redirect your browser to the single-page/print view for a number of popular sites (21 as of today).
- famousactress 15y agoI'm totally confused by the apparent consensus sentiment going around on this. I adore Instapaper. I think it's unbelievably well done, I use it, and I don't have plans to look elsewhere.. that said, I can't say I worry or get sad about people who develop competing products. Seriously? It's ridiculous to react that way. First of all, I find it patronizing. Marco's really fucking good at what he does. If it turns out that what he does is easy enough for someone else to swoop in and do better easily, then what he does isn't all that interesting. I doubt that's the case. Second... fucking of course. This is how it works, and how it's supposed to work. We're all consumers first, producers second. As consumers we benefit from this mechanism CONSTANTLY, and the things we consume are directly responsible for making the things we produce possible. We all got Facebook from Myspace from Friendster... Look at your car, look at your appliances, look at anything in your life. The ability to completely rip off shit and do part of it a little better is where much more innovation comes from than individual giant Big New Ideas. The folks that stay on top for prolonged periods of time are folks who capitalize on that are able to do that internally instead of resting on their laurels, and frankly Marco has proven that tendency as well. [Edit] Sorry, further. The point isn't what Instapaper (as a product) is today, and this is exactly why small companies are great. It's what Marco is. When I go down the street and buy fresh pasta from the place that's been making it for longer than I've been alive, I'm not buying a product.. I'm investing in a relationship... A relationship that I can trust to deliver me compelling value on an ongoing basis. It's one thing to swoop in and build a product that looks very much like one that's on the market (only free, or whatever). That's not interesting to me. You haven't really accomplished anything valuable. In fact, it's easy to argue you've literally sucked value out of the world. It's another thing to replicate the ability to deserve people's trust that you'll continue to deliver value in new ways... even if the original source for your inspiration is gone (and especially if you were to blame for it). TL/DR: I ain't scurred. [Edit] Downvote explanation anyone?
- nonane 15y agoI didn't down vote you and I do agree with most of what you've said regarding competition (I suspect the rest of HN also agrees). What you didn't address though is Marco's past relationship with the founders. Specifically he says that he advised the founders, promoted Readability on his website and even created a white-labeled Instapaper version of Readability. Now they've created a direct competitor to Marco's app. This is generating the sentiment.
- tzury 15y agoThey are certainly a direct competitor to Instapaper now. But it didn’t catch me by surprise, and I hope to still remain friendly with them. This is a very big and increasingly crowded market, and there’s no reason why we can’t respectfully share it. Those are inspiring words, which I will keep in mind. It is a very healthy approach toward competition and competitors, and I would rather adapt this one instead of "we shall smash our competitors to death" which is more in common (see all recent patent suites for instance)
- davidu 15y agoIt's not how things usually work out. Cisco and Juniper aren't friendly competitors. They are each trying as hard as possible to destroy the other. And the employees at each company feel the same. Less so at Cisco because they are so much larger, but at Juniper, they are absolutely focused on "kill Cisco."
- gizzlon 15y agowell, I might be cynical, but do your really thinks he's 100% honest when saying that?
- recoiledsnake 15y ago>In February of this year, the app was finished and ready to launch, but it was rejected by Apple for the in-app-purchase subscription-matching rule, which had just gone into effect. Readability decided that they didn’t want to give Apple the 30%, so the app was put on hold and soon cancelled once it was obvious that nobody was budging. Readability didn't decide they didn't want to give 30%, they just couldn't because then Apple would end up with all of Readability's revenues.
- hullo 15y agoI was firmly on Readability's side on that, but don't lose site of the fact that Readability set their own business model. They're willing to cut their take to 0% now, they just weren't willing to do it then. The difference being before content creators would have gotten 70%. Now they get 0. (For the general, publicized case). Back in February they could have easily revised their own plan, to take 70% of net rather than gross, say.
- joeguilmette 15y agoOffline reading and (more importantly) multiplatform support is going to keep me with Instapaper. The fact that I can get Instapaper articles to my Kindle is something that I know Apple is never going to offer. Ever. Now, if Apple offered an eInk Ereader that synced with Reading List (and offline support for Reading List) for less than $100 then maybe I'd jump ship. In all honesty there would need to be a VERY compelling feature set at a low (free) price for Instapaper to lose me. I've already bought the iOS apps and incorporated the service into my flow.
- orionlogic 15y agoLast time i use Readability it was too slow and stop using it. Original idea one was instant. So i use Readable most of the time. And sometimes i combine (Instapaper Text + Safari Read list). Speed is important, other features are secondary.
- scorpion032 15y agotl;dr: "Competition is good; It motivates me to keep my offering better" There are in numerous Basecamp clones out there, yet a handful of them manage to do a percent of the revenues Basecamp does.