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The next generation of Instapaper

marco.org

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Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#21

Post by elithrar »

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…

Instapaper is nice because I felt like I was paying a reasonable amount for an app that I use regularly.

Pocket, although having its own benefits, is free. Any service with ongoing costs (parsing servers) that charges nothing for their app has me questioning their longevity.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#24

Post by kmfrk »

nsxwolf wrote: post #15

Anyone want to guess at the valuation? Betaworks didn't spend much on Digg, wonder how deep their pockets are.

One way to look at it is that the money people paid for Instagram has already gone to Marco.

What he's "selling" are potential future customers, subscriber fees, and ads.

I don't know what the curve on user adoption looks like, but it seems like a smart choice from a financial point of view.

It'll be interesting how this fits into the upcoming Digg RSS reader.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#25

Post by runjake »

elithrar wrote: post #21
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…

Instapaper is nice because I felt like I was paying a reasonable amount for an app that I use regularly. Pocket, although having its own benefits, is free. Any service with ongoing costs (parsing servers) that charges nothing for their app has me questioning their longevity.

You should be questioning how they make money instead. Because if it's free for you, you're probably the thing being sold in that scenario.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#27

Post by ishbits »

Funny.. Just a few weeks I was wondering if Marco was bored of Instapaper and tried out Pocket in case he was going to dump it.

Doesn't matter, I ended up liking Pocket better after having been a long time Instapaper user.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#28

Post by incision »

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…

Speaking of Pocket, I'm baffled by their lack of (recently upgraded to simply lacking) sharing functionality and full-text search.

Passing a Pocket link to someone without a Pocket account leads to a sign-up page. If the recipient already has an account or goes to the trouble to sign up, they're redirected to their own queue, not the linked article. If the recipient goes to the trouble to sign up and pocket the same page themselves they will end up successfully accessing the getpocket.com/a/read/XXXXXXXXX URL that they were original sent.

Pocket is throwing away potential new users who quit at the sign up page and useful information about how existing users share.

Within the last month, they finally added some sharing functionality, but it sends links to the original not the pocket version. Another opportunity to pull new users into a test drive of the product being thrown away.

Lack of full-text search makes referencing anything down the road incredibly difficult. I've ended up regularly importing my Pocket queue to historious [1] to achieve this.

At this point, the only thing that keeps me using Pocket is the very nice Android app.

1: http://historio.us

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#29

Post by umsm »

vasco wrote: post #17
abdophoto wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think he was referring to the math involved (even though he wrote it) ;)

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#30

Post by abdophoto »

vasco wrote: post #17
abdophoto wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah absolutely.
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