Since they don't seem to bother actually sharing their ten year plan, let me share what I want their ten year plan to be:<p>- We're planning no new user visible features. Instapaper will continue to work just the way you've grown to like it, and we're not planning to change stuff around.<p>- We're working on making text extraction even more reliable. Besides blog posts and news articles, we hope to improve text extraction from PDFs, slide decks or even twitter threads. Whatever textual content you find on the web, with Instapaper you can save it for distraction free reading, now or later.<p>- Our apps will see ongoing development to improve compatibility (eg. support new devices/OS updates as they come out), but no major new features. Quality assurance will be our top priority.<p>- and last but not least, our goal is to establish a small, but profitable company to keep the project alive! Besides the technical aspects, our new business plan will make sure that we're thinking ahead and that we're never caught off guard by something like the GDPR again.
It feels weird to me that they’re putting those monetisation hooks back in without talking at all about the future of the product. I’ve used Instapaper for many years now, and I’m more than happy to pay for a service that I get so much value out of, but that said, Instapaper’s largely stagnated in recent years, with very little in the way of major updates or improvements. I’d really love to see even a rough roadmap that could give me some idea of where they want to be say, a year from now, but right now I don’t have a ton of confidence.
I switched to emailthis after the EU fiasco. <a href="https://www.emailthis.me/" rel="nofollow">https://www.emailthis.me/</a><p>You get a parsed html email with the article without the adds. It literally supports every app there is for saving (you just share via email). You can read it from any email client and easily share it with your friends. I also use fastmail which has a great full text search so finding old articles is a breeze. You can also do many cool stuff with IFTTT because again, it's just email.
Good to see the 6 months Premium for EU users, but I am still unconvinced; I switched to Pocket after the GDPR fiasco, is there any reason to switch back?
Read-it-later software seems surprisingly hard to monetize given how few are in the space. Pocket, Instapaper and Pinboard seem to be the only valid players.<p>The ability to facilitate "archiving a webpage" seems to be simple, but read-it-later software needs to be more than that to the modern internet user it seems.<p>It needs to;
+ Save video and images
+ Most people require a TTS service of sorts
+ Even more people want text-extraction (and boy-oh-boy this is hard)
+ Cross-platform apps & syncing<p>Where are the big costs here?
Is it;<p>1. Scale (Syncing all that multimedia must be expensive)
2. Talent (doubt it's this all the teams seem to be extremely small teams)
3. AI & Scraping development (Most services are poor in their offerings here, not sure its this)<p>I've been thinking about the space a LOT and started to try and develop some pieces of software that eventually I hope people will be able to stitch together into something great.<p>When i've observed problems like this before it seems that eventually a large open source project comes along and kills the markets chance of generating any money, and read-it-later services seem to fit in that fuzzily-defined-in-my-head-only market segment.
After all these comments stating that they changed to Pocket I find it important to point out we also have an self-hosted and open source alternative to these 2:<p>Wallabag (<a href="https://wallabag.org/en" rel="nofollow">https://wallabag.org/en</a>)<p>Unfortunately it's very hard to set Wallabag up without having access to VirtualHosts.
Well this is kind of annoying. They gave out premium to everyone when Pinterest bought them, but now that they are a private company again they took away features from me that I was used to using as a free user. I get why, but it still rubs me the wrong way. Reminds me of the PushBullet monetization stuff[0].<p>[0] <a href="https://blog.pushbullet.com/2015/11/17/introducing-pushbullet-pro/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.pushbullet.com/2015/11/17/introducing-pushbulle...</a>
Straight from their privacy policy [0]:<p>--
Please note: To ensure easy account creation, minimal customer errors, and reduced support inquiries, Instapaper accounts initially do not have passwords. If left without a password, anyone can access your account if they know or guess your username.
--<p>This sounds like a serious security issue if you ask me.<p>[0] = <a href="https://www.instapaper.com/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://www.instapaper.com/privacy</a>
I would have loved/expected a short explanation as to why GDPR compliance took so long to achieve.<p>I really love Instapaper and use it a lot. Especially the send to kindle feature. Luckily for them I did not stumble upon an easy 1:1 replacement.<p>But not even explaining the challenges seems quite a bit off and suspect. It is not like I keep my health records there (at least to my knowledge :) )
How about making it anything less than painful to use on an iPad. Like, maybe some of your developers can actually try to use it on an iPad? If this has been fixed, I retract. I've moved on long ago.
Meanwhile, Instapaper just killed their Apple Watch app: <a href="http://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/08/03/instapaper-apple-watch-app-removal/" rel="nofollow">http://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/08/03/instapaper-apple-wat...</a>