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Mozilla Acquires Pocket

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#201

Post by enobrev »

vertebrate wrote: post #148
enobrev wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, whe…

You are not alone, but I just use bookmarks for that. Is using Pocket any different from that, e.g. does it save pages internally so if the original site goes down the page will still be available in Pocket?

Yes, Pocket saves a snapshot of the original, as well as a slimmed down version that's ideal for reading (akin to a "readability" version - maybe exactly that).

The mobile app also syncs the slimmed down versions so you can read them while offline. If you're using it for that, be sure to open the pocket app once in a while as it will stop syncing if you haven't opened the app for some [undetermined] amount of time.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#202

Post by hkmurakami »

yuhong wrote: post #190
zobzu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird doesn't make money. Pocket makes money. That Mozilla is a Corp owned by a not-for-profit isn't the real thing anymore (ie not what people may believe, not that they have any obligation beside following the rule of law) - it just frees the Corp from having to report to random share holders - instead, the Corp and the Org self-select a Board of directors that they report to. At the end of the day, it's othe…

I really wish there was an easier way to do this, ideally something like a corporation with no shareholders.

A corporation is a legal entity, so to do this I imagine you must alter the country's legal code first?

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#204

Post by hkmurakami »

notatoad wrote: post #153
anexprogrammer wrote: post #48

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 Mo…

The people that complain about mozilla stopping development on thunderbird seem to be the same people that complain about things like firefox moving to WebExtensions, and Firefox changing their UI, and Firefox integrating Pocket. I don't understand why people are disappointed that Mozilla has stopped actively developing thunderbird - it means it's not going to change . There is an email client that you like, as is, a…

Well, at some point OS compatibility will break, no?

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#205

Post by morsch »

kibwen wrote: post #101
mbel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> XUL was the future of old-school, heavy desktop applications. The old-school, heavy desktop apps seem to be so unbelievably light in comparison to current electron-based craziness. But I guess we deserve all the bloat for not being able to come up with sensible common API for desktop development :(

Thunderbird didn't lose to an Electron-based app, it lost to Gmail.

FWIW, and this is not make a point either way, Google Mail downloads about 14 MB, two thirds of which is JS. Most of that can be cached, though. It also uses 120 MB RAM after initial load, more as I click around. Figures as reported by the Firefox dev tools.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#206

Post by SamBam »

greyman wrote: post #149
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't all that obvious how the offline function works - which is a shame. I've been caught without offline availability for some articles I saved. The main thing with the work-around is that you need to start Pocket on your phone while you have a data connection so that the articles are on the phone. There may be an option to automatically download the articles, but I've never found it. After the one-time data con…

> The main thing with the work-around is that you need to start Pocket on your phone while you have a data connection so that the articles are on the phone. Hmm, I always found this to be obvious, and not a work-around. How else would they entered the phone?

I would not expect to have to open the app. I can set my podcast manager to download episodes automatically -- I don't need to remember to open the app while I'm on data.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#207

Post by bttf »

bosie wrote: post #170
bttf wrote: post #127

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 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 pr…

I signed up and tried to use it but I don't even understand how to add links. The search bar hangs itself (chrome 56) and there seems no way to manually add a link? Am i missing something?

bosie, so far there aren't any guides/helpful messaging or placeholders, so my apologies it's not clear.

the functionality as it stands is, pasting a link and hitting ENTER will add the link.

it needs to be pre-pended with http in order for it to add a link, otherwise it will perform a search.

this will be changed to add a link (http prefixed or not) in any case when there are no search results

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#208

Post by bttf »

UnfalseDesign wrote: post #197
bttf wrote: post #127

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 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 pr…

It doesn't sound like you are a competitor for Pocket. It sounds like you are a competitor to Diigo. You might want to re-evaluate who your competitors are and do a SWOT analysis of them.

thanks for the tip. diigo is definitely a competitor (was noticed by our analysis a long time ago but attention to it has fell by the wayside). pocket seems like the biggest whale, so naturally have pinned it as one of our competitors. i think any save-for-later app that introduces discoverability is a competitor

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#209

Post by m-p-3 »

wirddin wrote: post #81
apetresc wrote: post #32

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 t…

This problem got solved when YouTube started allowing offline videos. Idk if it is available in your country, but in India you don't need to be a paying customer to save offline videos.

India usually get those offline features much more faster than other countries for some reason.

I wish we had these options in Canada, because mobile bandwidth is stupidly expensive over here.

Re: Mozilla Acquires Pocket

#210

Post by pseudalopex »

Jach wrote: post #132
yellowapple wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own reason for disliking it was that it's a closed-source piece of an otherwise-FOSS browser. Hopefully this acquisition means a change for the better on that front.

I always thought that complaint was kind of odd. It's essentially the same as their Search input. Google/Yahoo/etc. are proprietary but Firefox lets you talk to them directly from their browser. Similarly, the code for the Pocket button (component) for where it handles the user clicking the button, along with what it does to talk to the Pocket server, was all in the open and if you build from source you could just re…

Mozilla replaced Reading List (which was client-side encrypted and theoretically self-hostable) with Pocket (which is neither). Search engines need search terms to function; Pocket uses user data to support a particular business model.
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