Pinterest just bought Instapaper

Instapaper 7.1.2 for iOS iPhone screenshot 001

In a newsworthy move that in all likelihood makes lots of sense, the photo sharing service Pinterest has acquired Pinterest, the popular app and web service for saving webpages to read later.

According to the announcement, Pinterest will continue to develop and maintain the mobile Instapaper app, available at no charge on the App Store.

Keeping the dream alive

“For you, the Instapaper end user and customer, nothing changes,” reads the post.

Instapaper developers ensure that the deal with Pinterest will provide them with additional resources and experience necessary to advance their software.

Moreover, they’ll be taking their learnings to Pinterest’s discovery products, with Instapaper’s parsing technology potentially powering certain Rich Pin types.

The Instapaper team will be moving from Betaworks in New York City to Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco. “We’ll continue to make Instapaper a great place to save and read articles,” they ensured.

Not everything’s perfect: as of today, Instapaper’s app for developers—called Instaparser—has ceased taking signups and halted billing for existing customers. It’ll completely cease functioning on November 1, 2016.

Brief history of Instapaper

Instapaper started out in 2007 as a simple service with a Read Later bookmarklet and a stripped-down view for articles. It was created by Marco Arment, who at the time worked as lead developer and chief technology officer at Tumblr.

Marco would leave Tumblr in September 2010 and devote its full energies to Instapaper. In April 2013, he sold the controlling interest in Instapaper to a company called Betaworks. Arment is also behind the podcasting app Overcast and other projects, like Build and Analyze, The Magazine (a former Apple Newsstand publication) and Peace.

More recently, he’s co-hosted the Neutral and Accidental Tech podcasts with John Siracusa and Casey Liss, the Top Four podcast with his wife Tiffany and another one, called Under the Radar, with David Smith.

Both the Top Four and Under the Radar podcasts are on Relay FM.

My experience with Instapaper

Before Instapaper’s debut, I relied on a variety of so-so bookmarking services to save interesting links for later, like Digg, but they were all clunky, limited and poorly done.

Instapaper’s iPhone and iPad app supports many platform-specific features, such as an extension for iOS’s multi-purpose Share Sheet (plus, one for Today view). Unfortunately, powerful capabilities like full text search, text-to-speech, highlights and speed reading are locked behind what many have deemed a pricey subscription.

As a matter of fact, after Instapaper switched from a paid to subscription model I knew that was it for me. Having stopped using Instapaper over pricey annual subscriptions, I briefly toyed with Reader, an excellent read-later app/service that also employs a subscription model.

I eventually went on to fully embrace Safari’s Reading List, a feature I had no idea would fulfill all my needs regarding saving stuff for reading later and having those offline webpages available across all my devices.

Out of curiosity, which apps/services do you rely on to save articles for later?

Grab Instapaper for free from the App Store.

Source: Instapaper