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Instapaper is joining Pinterest

blog.instapaper.com

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Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#121

Post by tedmiston »

lukasb wrote: post #75
Arcsech wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I enjoy Pinner for iOS - http://pinnerapp.net/.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#122

Post by tedmiston »

Veen wrote: post #52
leejoramo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link to Wallabag, I had never heard of it. Looks very interesting. I use Pinboard, and pay for the archiving option. I even periodically request a tarball of the archive for my own backup. Pinboard archives the entire page, not just a readable version of the content. For archival and reference purposes, I like this. It would be nice if Pinboard also provided a readable option. In fact, a number of the…

Paperback offers a reasonably good reading experience for Pinboard links. https://readpaperback.com

Paperback looks interesting. I don't see it mentioned, but does it support highlighting & notes?

The demo seems to be broken for me.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#123

Post by tedmiston »

athenot wrote: post #21
brians wrote: post #15

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…

If you're on macOS / iOS, you can use the reading list. When you add items to your reading list from Safari, they get synced to your iOS device so you can read them offline from any of your devices. It does require iCloud but nothing beyond that.

Reading List is fine, though I wish it offered highlighting or note taking features.

I also tend to stuff my Instapaper full of hundreds of links which it handles no problem, but Reading List really crumbles adding a bunch at once when it tries to download everything.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#124

Post by tedmiston »

derefr wrote: post #28
athenot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on macOS / iOS, you can use the reading list. When you add items to your reading list from Safari, they get synced to your iOS device so you can read them offline from any of your devices. It does require iCloud but nothing beyond that.

I use Mobile Safari on iOS but Chrome on macOS. This means that, as much as I love Safari's Reading List, it's basically "unavailable" to me on the desktop. To put something in the Reading List from Chrome, I have to focus the URL bar, copy the URL, open Safari, paste and go to the URL, and then ⌘⇧D to put it in the list. (I can also right-click on the URL bar in Chrome and use the "Add to Reading List" OS Service, b…

Slightly easier — click and hold in the URL bar and drag to the Safari icon.

I also wrote a short AppleScript called Tab Transporter to move tabs between browsers. It's configured to go from Safari to Chrome but you could reverse that easily. I activate it via Alfred.

https://github.com/tedmiston/tab-transporter

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#125

Post by tedmiston »

pcl wrote: post #29
derefr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Mobile Safari on iOS but Chrome on macOS. This means that, as much as I love Safari's Reading List, it's basically "unavailable" to me on the desktop. To put something in the Reading List from Chrome, I have to focus the URL bar, copy the URL, open Safari, paste and go to the URL, and then ⌘⇧D to put it in the list. (I can also right-click on the URL bar in Chrome and use the "Add to Reading List" OS Service, b…

I've recently switched my primary browsing back to Safari on my 2012-era MacBook Air. Battery life is noticeably better. I still launch Chrome and FF regularly for development, but my tab-hell lives in Safari now.

Plug: OneTab for Chrome or Pinboard > Save tab set (in Chrome/Safari) are my best routes out of tab hell.

I find Safari often becomes unusable with 30–50 tabs.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#126

Post by tedmiston »

KarlFreeman wrote: post #69
brians wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Your product sounds interesting, especially the longterm roadmap. If you can replace Feedly as an bucket of RSS feeds to scan + Instapaper for reading & note taking, that'd be pretty sweet.

The pricing page is blank for me.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#127

Post by bthdonohue »

AndrewWarner wrote: post #107
cheeze wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that most of the concern comes from the fact that Pinterest has had no problem doing this in the past [1]. While it may not be the plan at this moment, things can change quickly, and with any change in a system like this, people are going to naturally worry since they've seen it happen countless times in the past. Congratulations on the acquisition, and I wish you the best going forward. [1] - https://medium.…

I hate when apps I like shut down. David was pretty open in the post you linked to: "Though the team will live on, we’ll be focused on building within the core Pinterest product."

Obviously the Math Camp acquisition was before my time, but my understanding is that acquisition was explicitly for the team and not the technology.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#128

Post by tedmiston »

niftich wrote: post #60
dmix wrote: post #48

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.

Can you summarize what their features are? From a quick web search, it seems to be: - Parsing a page for main body content, removing cruft, and reflowing it into an aesthetically pleasing layout - Cloud bookmarking these artifacts So how does this not run up against anti-scraping TOS provisions? Does money change hands between the publisher and the content-reflower?

For the most part, it does not scrape around paywalls (though I have seen it work in some cases). I'm not sure how they pull that off, perhaps sending the source from the client instead of the URL and re-rendering it on the server.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#129

Post by markpapadakis »

I used Instapaper for a long time before I switched to a Pocket.

There were issues with their parser they never fixed, has been consistently slow, articles would often be lost even though they were "saved" according to the apps that used the Instapaper API(or its browser extensions), it would take forever to download content over 3G ( maybe the client was downloading it? ). It just never got better for me.

They did introduce a killer feature(narration) and I switched to Instapaper from Pocket again for that feature alone (2 hours or commute time). Still annoying to use and as soon as Pocket implemented the same feature, I jumped ship again.

Pocket seems to be fast(at downloading content, and the iOS app is very responsive), their parser is improving and it's now by far my most used app on my phone.

I hope they get the resources they need to really improve their service though. They have lots of happy users and that must mean they are still doing something right.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#130

Post by tedmiston »

d_theorist wrote: post #103

Is anybody else mildly annoyed by this trend of announcing acquisitions as 'x is joining y'? What's wrong with saying that y has bought x?

"Joining" makes it ambiguous whether "y has bought x" or "x was sold to y".

It also seems to be used sometimes as a mask for acquihires (but I don't think that applies here).

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