I wonder how much this has to do with the rise of Pocket over the last year.<p>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).<p>Personally speaking, I bought Instapaper for myself and gifted it to a few other people over the years, but I switched to Pocket a few months ago. The continuous updates and simpler interface (those thumbnail pics are surprisingly useful) won me over, despite my hesitations about their business model.
Twitter can be dramatic <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveStreza/status/327550484745445376" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SteveStreza/status/327550484745445376</a>
When I compare this to the Parse/Facebook deal, this seems like a more natural transition.<p>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.<p>Congrats to both Marco and Betaworks.
I enjoyed the podcast that Marco had on the 5by5 network because he seemed like such a regular guy who happens to work hard and put out a popular product. A lot of times it also motivated me to get to work on my own things. Congrats to him and Im looking forward to what he does next
I switched from Instapaper to Readability about a year ago, despite Instapaper being faster and having a better (actual) business model. I was lured by the beautiful reading experience that comes with Readability’s iOS apps.<p>Hopefully, with a focussed team behind it, Instapaper will begin to catch up on the design front. I’m looking forward to seeing where Betaworks take it.
Arment two days ago: <a href="https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/326757551947530240" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/326757551947530240</a><p>He may be just refuting the "peak downloads/full time on Magazine" claim, but kind of an odd response given this.
In the article "Talent acquisitions" <a href="http://www.marco.org/2012/07/20/talent-acquisitions" rel="nofollow">http://www.marco.org/2012/07/20/talent-acquisitions</a> Marco criticized Pulp, Wallet, Sparrow and he wrote:<p><i>Instapaper has had multiple similar inquiries from large companies over the last few years. We’ve never gotten very far in talks because I don’t want Instapaper to shut down, I don’t want to move my family across the country, and they didn’t want to pay enough — for them, they’ll pay a premium to hire me, but they won’t pay much for a service they’ll shut down immediately and an app they’ll throw away.</i><p><i>I was only able to reject those offers because Instapaper is a healthy business, and the life that Instapaper provides for me and my family is better than what the big companies offered." </i><p><i>If you want to keep the software and services around that you enjoy, do what you can to make their businesses successful enough that it’s more attractive to keep running them than to be hired by a big tech company.</i><p>So it's not a "Talent acquisition", but how could we still keep the software and services around that us enjoy in the future?
Good for Marco, good for Instapaper, good for Betaworks.<p>I believe Marco when he says he's not done it out of worry for the competition. He's never seemed particularly bothered about having rivals, as Instapaper was making money. It does seem that his passion for the project was waning though, there's not been a new version for a while, compared to a few years ago where new features were arriving on a reasonably regular basis.<p>I think it'll be a good fit, whilst Marco might be bored with the project he wasn't going to give his crowning achievement up to anyone, so I imagine Betaworks will be taking it onwards and upwards. Good for us as well, it means Marco can find a new project to interest him.
I’m saddened by this announcement. I’m an early Instapaper paying subscriber, a The Magazine paying subscriber of the first hour, I’ve read every article on his blog, I’ve listened to all the episodes of Build & Analyze, Accidental Tech and the Neutral podcasts — I’ve spread the word every way I could and engaged with the sponsors of the shows. I became a Tumblr member because of him.<p>Marco has always talked about how important he felt it was to be independent and to offer a paid service in order not to be acquired. Given how he handled the Android release, I believed he would never sell Instapaper.<p>Last week, Loren Brichter announced he would be moving to Facebook. I’m still shell-shocked about that announcement as a very active Letterpress player, now this. I’m worried.<p>I will continue to pay for Marco’s products and services, but I am worried what will happen to Instapaper, which is an important tool for how I acquire information and do business.
Funny.. Just a few weeks I was wondering if Marco was bored of Instapaper and tried out Pocket in case he was going to dump it.<p>Doesn't matter, I ended up liking Pocket better after having been a long time Instapaper user.
Hope they don't remove the epub download option. Everybody's building iPhone apps, but last time I checked only Instapaper supported epubs. It's been great with my kobo reader*<p>* albeit, I run a script to fix some errors (based on <a href="http://opennomad.com/content/instapaper-epub-issues" rel="nofollow">http://opennomad.com/content/instapaper-epub-issues</a>)
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.<p>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.
I'm hoping that when Marco says "I've sold a majority stake" he doesn't mean "I've sold everything". I'm a big Instapaper fan, and I'd hate to see someone else take over deciding the direction the service should move in.<p>A big part of Instapaper's success comes from the fact that Marco's done a great job at steering the ship. He really is a world-class product guy who knows what to say no to.<p>Congratulations to Marco and Betaworks. I hope it works out well for all of us.
I've been hoping for innovation in the app for a while now. It'd be nice to have any sorts of options or filters to help you clear your backlog, such as "filter by shortest to longest" or "show all half read articles".<p>Hopefully this deal helps innovating an app that has become a bit stale.
Betaworks.com getting hammered right now. I hope they are better at managing Instapaper ops!<p>I tease, I tease. In all seriousness, congrats to Marco. A real hero of The Internet.
wondering if betaworks will just use the parser technology to use it for other products like the "RSS reader" DIGG announced or s.th. else.
Maybe they are trying to build something like www.dotdotdot.me