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Pinterest Acquires Instapaper (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Instapaper, a pioneering app for saving articles to read later, has been acquired -- again. The app, which was created by developer Marco Arment and sold to Betaworks in 2013, has found a new home at Pinterest. The goal is "to accelerate discovering and saving articles on Pinterest," the company said in a statement. It will continue to operate as a standalone app, and the Instapaper team will work on both that app and on Pinterest generally. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. As a visual search engine, Pinterest isn't often thought of as a place to bookmark written content. But in 2013 the company introduced article pins, a format that creates rich bookmarks complete with a photo and a preview of the text. The acquisition of Instapaper suggests the company believes there is more to be done there -- although it's not certain how valuable that will be for Pinterest. Instapaper can be used for free or in a $30-a-year premium version; the company has never said how many subscribers it has.
a pioneering app for saving articles to read later
Ah, the browser tab - a truly pioneering invention, hot on the heels of the bookmark.
Christ, nothing good in computing didn't already exist by the late '90s.
They keep wanting me to "sign up".
Never heard of "instapaper"... but I assume it will be behind a "sign me up" wall now too.
Meh.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
why would they go to the trouble of using one in an app that has even less general purpose?
Instapaper just seemed like a pretty RSS reader to me. With fluffy articles.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"Pinterest Acquires Instapaper" is like bragging that your poop contains partially digested corn niblets.
This has to be the most riveting tech business news I've read since Justin Timberlake and friends bought MySpace from NewsCorp for $35 million.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
They seem to dominate Google image search results with image links to their site. Kinda odd Google didn't so the same to images search as they did to regular search and banned lots of the SEO voodoo.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I've been using Instapaper as an offline reader for several years on my phone. This is because I have an underground train journey of about 40mins each way, during which time I have no network connectivity. Instapaper is pretty sweet, and it's rare that I save an article that it's not able to render later on. I collect a backlog of articles for my phone which I then read on the train.
If Pintrest fuck it up I shall rage hard, but I'm sure there are offline readers elsewhere. Instapaper is quite well designed though (both visually and functionally, although I thought their "tilt scrolling" experiment was a bit weird.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Didn't del.icio.us do this like 10+ years ago?
Ah, the browser tab
Until you close your browser. Or until your browser purges the document from RAM.
Android tablets run the Android operating system. Netbooks made since Windows- and X11/Linux-based netbooks were discontinued at the end of 2012 run either Android or Chrome OS. These mobile operating systems, unlike desktop operating systems, don't regularly use a swap file. Instead, when the device is about to run out of RAM, running applications are given a chance to release memory to the OS before being terminated by the OOM killer. Web browsers on mobile operating systems will react to a "trim memory" event by purging a document loaded in another tab with the intent of reloading it later from the network once the user switches back to that tab. This reloading doesn't work if you happen to be offline when you switch back.
https://www.wallabag.org/