81–90 of 217 posts
Good opportunity to build an OSS alternative? Or even a side-project... in the possible event Instapaper gets sidelined. That always seems to happen. With the exception of maybe Reddit.
If you don't want/need open source, but just a sustainable business that is not part of a data-harvesting company, then pinboard.in is probably your best bet.
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I'm cool with the idea of providing a readable option in Pinboard, since I already do something similar to get the text out of the page for indexing. Any library for this you particularly like?
Readability ( https://github.com/luin/readability ) is a classic, and included as part of Firefox (I think, maybe that's been discontinued). It's essentially a bag of hand-written heuristics but they're pretty good heuristics. Some interesting reading is Christian Kohlschütter's thesis on this problem, which is framed in academia as "how do we assemble good text corpuses from webpages for data analysis, which means r…
But I'm worried. I find that increasingly my interests do not align with the interests of large companies looking for quick growth and large-scale "monetization". I would like to see more sustainable business models, where the goal isn't mad growth and sale to a larger entity, but long-term steady business.
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It's fairly early stage but I've been actively building an alternative to Instapaper called Filltray ( https://filltray.com/guest ). Please feel free to follow @filltray to keep up to date with my progress.
What would this offer to differentiate itself from Wallabag?
Worth re-reading Marco Arment's blog post about selling Instapaper 3 years ago: https://marco.org/2013/04/25/instapaper-next-generation "Instapaper needs a new home where it can be staffed and grown, but I didn’t want to give it to a big company that would probably just shut it down in six months." Oof.
He "sold a majority stake", which means he still owned part of Instapaper. I assume Pinterest bought the whole thing and therefore gave Marco a large chunk of money? Nice for him.
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It's even better because in a bit of a dick move, they tried to buy pinboard.com back in 2009 or 2010. I say "dick move" because Pinboard predates Pinterest and they were aware of me.
Does this mean they're now guilty of trademark infringement (Apple Computers vs Apple Records style) and you can take all their VC money? "Instapaper By Pinterest™" seems pretty similar to Pinboard.
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Pinboard has a read-it-later feature. It works for me, and I know it won't change suddenly out from under me (unless idlewords gets hit by a bus, but eh). "It works, it's nice and fast, and will continue to work the same way for the foreseeable future" is pretty much the highest praise I can give a service like this, and Pinboard nails that aspect.
Do you have a mobile client you like? I remember being frustrated by what I could find for Pinboard, as far as replacing Instapaper.
It might be helpful for you to have a look through there and see if any of them have a stand out 'read it later' experience.
So what kind of value does Instapaper adds/will add to Pinterest? Will there be a pin it later functionality? I fail to see how Pinterest gains from such an acquisition.
Hmm... there are at least five possible acquisition benefits I can think of, beyond just the product and any specific product to product synergies. I'm speaking generally here, not about this specific acquisition. 1. Aquihiring may be cheaper then new hires overall, considering externalities. 2. The underlying tech may be useful. 3. The user base may be acquired. 4. the business relationships may be retained if they…
Pinterest is burning through enormous amounts of VC money.[0]
Betaworks seems to just be selling its Instapaper product, together with the Instapaper team.
Thus I'm guessing Pinterest needed a crew that could do what the Instapaper crew can do, and was willing to pay a lot more for it than it was worth to Betaworks.
I can totally see where that could be worth it to Pinterest. Talent is in short supply. Their revenue per engineer is probably not a good (nor available) metric but I bet their burn rate per engineer matters, and their "VCs are Impressed By That" per engineer is probably a huge deal for them.
Hopefully that crew is getting proper relocation packages.
(Or, of course, I'm totally wrong about everything. I don't actually use Pinterest, because it's too visitor-hostile.)
Oh and too bad about Instaparser, I thought that was the most interesting thing Instapaper had done yet. I'm sure somebody at Pinterest came up with a number for what it would cost to build that internally, and that number was probably close to the purchase price.
Bummer. I love and use instapaper, gathering articles for a few weeks to read at altitude. It's a great product, and I paid for a subscription these last years in the hopes that I could therefore continue to enjoy it. Now it's sold to Pinterest, one of the two sites I don't bother with links to—because I know Pinterest and Quora will require me to sign in rather than show me what they showed a search engine. What els…