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The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016

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Re: The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016

#2

Post by bouncingsoul »

I will miss this one. Used it for at least 4 years.

Other than wanting a highlighting feature, I've been completely satisfied with this abandoned product (last update at least 2 years ago?). They nailed it for me, especially with design aesthetics.

And it had the absolute best send-to-Kindle parser: It sent an actual personal document, not a Kindle magazine, and they even managed to include article images most of the time (which other services struggle with).

:'(

Re: The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016

#3

Post by dredmorbius »

Sad, but hardly surprising. I would really like to hear the backstory on this.

I'd run across Readability a few years ago and found it useful. There was an update to the application about 2012/2013, which as is typical, offered a few things, but also took away others which had been useful.

And then .... nothing. The Facebook page hasn't been updated since Januarey 23, 2014. The blog is ... offline. Twitter actually seems active, though I'd thought that hadn't been active either.

I really liked the concept, had issues with the execution, loved the bookmarklet (for rendering pages within a browser in "readability view"). But this had obviously been abandoned for a long, long time.

I've been slowly schlepping articles to Pocket. I guess I'll have to speed that up....

Hrm. I find this about the design firm behind Readability joining Facebook, a year ago: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/01/16/design-partners-behind-m...

Re: The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016

#4

Post by mmmcookies »

I worked on Readability for its launch. I remember they had difficulty monetising it. But more importantly, the firm that built it, Arc90 (now Postlight), was acquired by SFX a few years ago who has no interest in that space. I'm surprised it has stayed up this long.

Re: The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016

#8

Post by basch »

dredmorbius wrote: post #3

Sad, but hardly surprising. I would really like to hear the backstory on this. I'd run across Readability a few years ago and found it useful. There was an update to the application about 2012/2013, which as is typical, offered a few things, but also took away others which had been useful. And then .... nothing. The Facebook page hasn't been updated since Januarey 23, 2014. The blog is ... offline. Twitter actually s…

the weird thing is, readability.com/topreads recently had a makeover to make it more responsive.

it really really sucks losing instapaper daily and readability top reads in the same year. imho, readability.com/topreads was one of the best surveys of what was popular in the longformish world on a given day.

Re: The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016

#9

Post by basch »

bouncingsoul wrote: post #2

I will miss this one. Used it for at least 4 years. Other than wanting a highlighting feature, I've been completely satisfied with this abandoned product (last update at least 2 years ago?). They nailed it for me, especially with design aesthetics. And it had the absolute best send-to-Kindle parser: It sent an actual personal document, not a Kindle magazine, and they even managed to include article images most of the…

they had

1) one of the best pool of popular articles in a day - readability.com/topreads 2) best kindle send to 3) best reading mode for a browser

i feel very mildly traumatized losing readability.com/topreads. redef+longform dont quite cover everything topreads did.

for people who dont know what it was - https://web.archive.org/web/20150415110937/https://readabili...

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