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Mozilla Acquires Pocket and Its More Than 10 Million Users (recode.net)

Posted by BeauHD on from the read-it-later dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser, is buying Pocket, the read-it-later service, for an undisclosed amount. Pocket, which is described by Mozilla as its first strategic acquisition, will continue to operate as a Mozilla subsidiary. Founder Nate Weiner will continue to run Pocket, along with his team of about 25 people. Pocket, previously known as Read It Later, lets users bookmark articles, videos and other content to read or view later on the web or a mobile device. It's great for things like saving offline copies of web articles to read on plane rides or subway commutes, especially where internet access is sparse. Pocket, which was founded in 2007, has more than 10 million monthly active users, according to a rep. That's not bad, but suggests it's still a fairly niche service, especially as big firms like Facebook and Apple build simple "reading list" features into their platforms.

18 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by ToTheStars · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What does this have to do with making a simple, secure, extensible browser? I can understand wanting to diversify revenue sources away from corporate handouts, but how much money can a minor social network be making if even the giants (e.g. Twitter) are struggling to make ends meet?

    1. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by Desler · · Score: 2

      I mean, why not chastize Google for all the non-search engine stuff they do

      People do, routinely.

      or Apple for diversifying into cellphones?

      Because iPhones have made 100s of billions of dollars for Apple whereas Mozilla's products outside of Firefox have all been abject failures and have been canceled one after the other?

    2. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by xfizik · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Read The Mozilla manifesto
      Nowhere does it say anything about

      making a simple, secure, extensible browser

      In fact, it doesn't even say anything about a browser. Their mission is to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web. Whether they are making any progress with that is up for debate, but it's silly to complain about the browser every time you see the word "Mozilla". Mozilla the organization is bigger than Firefox.

    3. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by AuMatar · · Score: 2

      No, it isn't. Or at least it shouldn't be. When their entire goal was to make a browser, they did good work. Everything since then has watered down their effort and caused them to lose focus on the one thing they absolutely needed to have win in order to achieve their goals. They should be completely shut down other than Seamonkey/Firefox.

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
    4. Re:MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      I think they have given up on being a popular browser.

      I used Pocket back when it was Read It Later. I found I would just add stuff to my list for reading one day, on the plane, and never do it. I'd load the laptop up with movies and then end up watching the in-flight entertainment. Might as well use /dev/null.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    5. Re: MozColonSlashSlashA is at it again! by corychristison · · Score: 2

      (Un)fortunately(?) Mozilla already essentially haulted development on Thunderbird except for security and compatibility patches.

  2. It's Love! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If feels like someone at Mozilla is deeply in love with the Pocket founder. First, they integrated Pocket into Firefox in what seemed little more than an attempt to leverage the browser to bring more business to Pocket. I don't know how well that went, but now they're delivering him a very sweet Valentine's Day gift of a (presumably) large pot of money to keep on doing what he was doing before.

    Love doesn't have to be rational, and Pocket doesn't have to advance the goals of Firefox.

    1. Re:It's Love! by JohnFen · · Score: 2

      I don't know how well that went

      Me neither, but I do know that when they did that, it was the first time I got the feeling from Firefox that I get from IE and Chrome: that the browser has become actively hostile to me.

  3. Pocket? The thing i instantly disabled in FF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Never heard of it.

  4. Donations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Did they pay for this with the money they received from donations?

    1. Re:Donations by jopsen · · Score: 3, Informative

      No, Foundation and Corporation are different entities. Corp is owned by Foundation... but as I understand it there are some legal/tax constructs limiting movement of funds from Corp to Foundation, so it's not the same dollar.

  5. Re:Wow, 10 million users! by sunderland56 · · Score: 2

    10 million users in only 10 years. At that astounding rate they'll be significant by the year 2500 or so.

    In the meantime a google search of "disable pocket" gets 925,000 results.

  6. Re:it lets me do what now? by Tx · · Score: 2

    I'm no fan of pocket, it's disabled in my Firefox, but let's be fair, it does a little bit more than just bookmarks. You can view articles offline, which is still an issue for people who fly a lot (maybe other kinds of transport too) - you can see an article on your desktop browser that you want to read on your flight later, just pocket it and it's done. It does quite a good job of cleaning up pages, kinda like FF reading mode, and joining unnecessarily multi-page articles into a single document, at least on some sites. Sure there have been ways of achieving that since forever, I remember using some software back in the Pocket PC days to grab web pages and sync them to my Pocket PC for offline reading, but I haven't come across anything that makes it quite as easy as pocket. I didn't really play around with it enough to know what else it can do; if I travelled frequently, I'd probably use it, but since I only fly like three or four times a year, and the rest of the time I'm pretty much permanently online, I can't see a use for it.

    --
    Oh no... it's the future.
  7. How to Disable Pocket on Firefox. by NiteRiderXP · · Score: 5, Informative

    1. Open new tab
    2. Type about:config in address bar and accept warning
    3. In the search box type pocket
    4. Toggle extensions.pocket.enabled to false

    I do this for all new Firefox installations. Also disabled hello (aka loop) until they removed it.

  8. Too much money by manu0601 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Does Mozilla has too much money in its hands? There is a lot of room for improvement of Firefox itself, that should be the priority.

  9. Does this mean Pocket will be open source now? n/t by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does this mean Pocket will be open source now?

  10. Re:What does this have to do... by hackwrench · · Score: 2

    I think this was a service they were trying to embed into their browser before they bought them. I think they want to make the service a browser feature like remembering bookmarks and passwords across computers.

  11. Nate Weiner = Chad Weiner's son (Mozilla) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    No, Chad Weiner of Mozilla is the father of Nate Weiner of Pocket:

    https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/author/cweinermozilla-com/