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The next generation of Instapaper

marco.org

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Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#101

Post by jvzr »

kayoone wrote: post #99
incision wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And I have hundreds of "important" bookmarks in Chrome that I'll probably never check again. That's a pretty terrible analogy. What I have in Pocket is more than a bunch of bookmarks, it's a local archive of everything I've added. I can read it in a nice flowing text format and benefit from limited search functionality. I can reference anything in there anytime whether I have connectivity or not, whether the source…

if you have unread items going back for more than a year, chances are you are adding more to the list than you are removing. I guess hes right, i have observed this in myself and many colleagues from the days of delicious onwards. You bookmark/tag alot of interesting stuff because you are absolutely sure you will need it again and then forgetting about it after several weeks/months never looking at it again. In the c…

I think OP's saying he has read archives going back 1 year and a half. Not unread, read.

I too have hundreds of read articles sitting in my Instapaper's archives, and a few dozens of favorites. I'm more concerned for them than the unread articles.

If Pocket goes away in the blink of an eye, what becomes of your archives & favorites?

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#102

Post by smackfu »

lostlogin wrote: post #90
Shank wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Has there been some sort of falling out between Arment, Siracusa and Gruber - they all left 5by5 within a short time of the Gruber move, and in my opinion their shows are now worse.

I think for the two recent guys that left, they were just burned out on having to carry all the content of a weekly show alone. Now their new podcast is more of a conversation and they can just BS without much prep.

For Gruber, I assume it was just money. Someone else offered him more or an ownership stake that he wasn't going to get from 5x5.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#103

Post by smackfu »

kmfrk wrote: post #24
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.

I wouldn't be surprised if Instapaper has a free version again very soon.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#104

Post by incision »

kayoone wrote: post #99
incision wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And I have hundreds of "important" bookmarks in Chrome that I'll probably never check again. That's a pretty terrible analogy. What I have in Pocket is more than a bunch of bookmarks, it's a local archive of everything I've added. I can read it in a nice flowing text format and benefit from limited search functionality. I can reference anything in there anytime whether I have connectivity or not, whether the source…

if you have unread items going back for more than a year, chances are you are adding more to the list than you are removing. I guess hes right, i have observed this in myself and many colleagues from the days of delicious onwards. You bookmark/tag alot of interesting stuff because you are absolutely sure you will need it again and then forgetting about it after several weeks/months never looking at it again. In the c…

>If you have unread items going back for more than a year, chances are you are adding more to the list than you are removing.

I think you're missing the point and stuck in the use case of these tools as simple bookmarks or reading lists.

I have little reason to remove anything, ever. It's all being stored for free/negligible cost. I can reference it whenever and wherever I like.

>In the case that you need that knowledge again, you just dig it up on google (if you can remember it).

Right, I can search Google's index how ever many billion pages, hoping that what I want still exists online and that I can remember something specific enough about it to filter the specific needle I want out of the world's largest haystack.

Alternatively, I can just search the store described above which holds point in time copies of the relatively tiny subset of things I've actually seen or at least found interesting in the past. I can use utterly generic, half remember descriptions like "database" and get just a few matches rather than the 764,000,000 of Google.

>Might not be true for you, but i am sure its pretty common behaviour.

That's fine, I understand how people might choose to use these service differently than I do.

This tangent started with mtgx claiming an inability to understand why anyone would care about longevity or keep years of data in such tools.

I'm trying to help with that understanding.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#105

Post by reefab »

benparsons wrote: post #94
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…

I have no particular loyalty to Instapaper, but their major feature over Pocket, for me, is sending a compilation to kindle as an ebook (Kindle sees it as a magazine, complete with TOC.) People have been asking for this feature from Pocket for a while now ( http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/questions/286894-k... ), but without much encouragement that it will appear.

Here you go: http://www.crofflr.com/auth/login

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#106

Post by Aissen »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #69
incision wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Prior to the name change, Pocket offered a $3 "Pro" version. I'm guessing that Pocket means to be acquired eventually. Pulse runs a free app parsing/serving from App Engine and took in $9.8M in funding before being acquired by LinkedIn for $90M. Po…

I'm guessing that Pocket means to be acquired eventually. And those acquisitions work out so well for the product, especially smaller, more niche products. If they've taken that much money, they are going to have to provide a strategy to monetize. If they are doing it for free, it means they are selling analytics about what you are reading to somebody else. For myself, I'll pay for the app.

Exactly.

I had invested time in Spool, and when they got acquired by Facebook, all I got was a bookmark list in a mail attachment and no more service. No readable article, no offline video, etc.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#107

Post by dpcx »

lostlogin wrote: post #90
Shank wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Has there been some sort of falling out between Arment, Siracusa and Gruber - they all left 5by5 within a short time of the Gruber move, and in my opinion their shows are now worse.

Gruber left in February 2012 [1]. Hypercritical continued until December [2]. Build and Analyze the same [3].

Siracusa and Arment both said they thought the shows had run the course. Siracusa is also a regular on The Incomparable [4].

[1]: http://5by5.tv/talkshow [2]: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical [3]: http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze [4]: http://5by5.tv/incomparable

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#108

Post by incision »

jvzr wrote: post #101
kayoone wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you have unread items going back for more than a year, chances are you are adding more to the list than you are removing. I guess hes right, i have observed this in myself and many colleagues from the days of delicious onwards. You bookmark/tag alot of interesting stuff because you are absolutely sure you will need it again and then forgetting about it after several weeks/months never looking at it again. In the c…

I think OP's saying he has read archives going back 1 year and a half. Not unread, read . I too have hundreds of read articles sitting in my Instapaper's archives, and a few dozens of favorites. I'm more concerned for them than the unread articles. If Pocket goes away in the blink of an eye, what becomes of your archives & favorites?

>If Pocket goes away in the blink of an eye, what becomes of your archives & favorites?

Seems like the type of thing to be proactive about it.

Pocket has an API that you could use to sync with another similar service , or roll something of your own. They also have a simple export which provides a list of source URLs for what you've pocketed.

I've set Kippt up to retrieve from Pocket and used to the manual export to load things into historious [1].

As a last resort, on the Android version all the offline assets and pages can be found here [2].

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5610492 2: com.ideashower.readitlater.pro/files/RIL_offline

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#109

Post by aeonflux »

For at least year Instapaper wasn't really moving forward. Design feels outdated, the website looks like thrash. Pocket on the other hand looks and feels pretty awsome. As you can the fact you paid for the app or not has nothing to do with this outcome so far.

Instapaper situation is the best example, that Marco's jabber that you should pay for apps if you wan't them to last is just plain wrong. The free vs paid doesn't really matter in long run. Fortunatlley you can switch from one to another within a week, so its not much of an investment anyway.

Re: The next generation of Instapaper

#110

Post by smackfu »

skeletonjelly wrote: post #54
ambirex wrote: post #6

When I compare this to the Parse/Facebook deal, this seems like a more natural transition. I actually doubt it has much to do with Pocket, instead I think is exactly how Marco put it, grown bigger than a single person could manage. Congrats to both Marco and Betaworks.

If it had grown bigger than one person could manage, why not hire somebody?

The other complication is that Instapaper is in a weird place in its lifecycle. It's got lots of paid users, but they paid years ago, and now they are just a drag on making any kind of meaningful changes. Investing a lot of money to improve the app probably wouldn't pay off.
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