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.

Comments

I don't use pinterest

[NotQuiteReal]

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.

Re:How... pioneering

[0100010001010011]

Yes, me and my single computer on a single browser quite enjoy bookmarks.

Pinterest a Google image spam bot

[future assassin]

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.

If you live in London, Instapaper is cool

[gilgongo]

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.