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The next generation of Instapaper

marco.org

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Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#11

Post by marbletiles »

abdophoto wrote: post #10
rkudeshi wrote: post #3

I wonder how much this has to do with the rise of Pocket over the last year. It's no secret that Pocket has improved dramatically since rebranding a year ago. And I'm sure most people who are looking for their first "read-later" app are trying Pocket (free) before buying Instapaper ($5). Personally speaking, I bought Instapaper for myself and gifted it to a few other people over the years, but I switched to Pocket a…

It absolutely had something to do with it. I don't think anyone would say that Instapaper is 4x better than Pocket ($3.99 vs Free). If anything Pocket has clearly made a name for itself with better design and its new Pocket for Publishers API. I think Instapaper saw its peak about 6 month - 1 year ago and with The Magazine doing well, it was smart of Marco to sell it off in my opinion.

Instapaper's parsing is 3x better at least. Very often I see Pocket lose chunks of articles over innocuous divs.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#13

Post by evan_ »

Kylekramer wrote: post #7

Arment two days ago: https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/326757551947530240 He may be just refuting the "peak downloads/full time on Magazine" claim, but kind of an odd response given this.

In retrospect that seems like a tease of today's announcement- He's saying that Instapaper's best days are still to come.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#14

Post by 1123581321 »

abdophoto wrote: post #10
rkudeshi wrote: post #3

I wonder how much this has to do with the rise of Pocket over the last year. It's no secret that Pocket has improved dramatically since rebranding a year ago. And I'm sure most people who are looking for their first "read-later" app are trying Pocket (free) before buying Instapaper ($5). Personally speaking, I bought Instapaper for myself and gifted it to a few other people over the years, but I switched to Pocket a…

It absolutely had something to do with it. I don't think anyone would say that Instapaper is 4x better than Pocket ($3.99 vs Free). If anything Pocket has clearly made a name for itself with better design and its new Pocket for Publishers API. I think Instapaper saw its peak about 6 month - 1 year ago and with The Magazine doing well, it was smart of Marco to sell it off in my opinion.

I tried Pocket and couldn't get past not having article length indicator, the quick archive/delete menu, favorites, and the Kindle auto-digest. Has the situation improved in any of those areas?

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#16

Post by gingerlime »

Hope they don't remove the epub download option. Everybody's building iPhone apps, but last time I checked only Instapaper supported epubs. It's been great with my kobo reader*

* albeit, I run a script to fix some errors (based on http://opennomad.com/content/instapaper-epub-issues)

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#17

Post by vasco »

abdophoto wrote: post #10
rkudeshi wrote: post #3

I wonder how much this has to do with the rise of Pocket over the last year. It's no secret that Pocket has improved dramatically since rebranding a year ago. And I'm sure most people who are looking for their first "read-later" app are trying Pocket (free) before buying Instapaper ($5). Personally speaking, I bought Instapaper for myself and gifted it to a few other people over the years, but I switched to Pocket a…

It absolutely had something to do with it. I don't think anyone would say that Instapaper is 4x better than Pocket ($3.99 vs Free). If anything Pocket has clearly made a name for itself with better design and its new Pocket for Publishers API. I think Instapaper saw its peak about 6 month - 1 year ago and with The Magazine doing well, it was smart of Marco to sell it off in my opinion.

3.99$ vs 0$ means it is infinitely better not just 4x times better.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#18

Post by Shank »

emehrkay wrote: post #4

I enjoyed the podcast that Marco had on the 5by5 network because he seemed like such a regular guy who happens to work hard and put out a popular product. A lot of times it also motivated me to get to work on my own things. Congrats to him and Im looking forward to what he does next

Unrelated to the article, but Marco & a couple others now run a different podcast: http://atp.fm/

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#20

Post by pinder »

I've been hoping for innovation in the app for a while now. It'd be nice to have any sorts of options or filters to help you clear your backlog, such as "filter by shortest to longest" or "show all half read articles".

Hopefully this deal helps innovating an app that has become a bit stale.

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