Time will tell how well Android phone apps really sell.īut it’s less relevant, since the second is no longer true: the Nook Color, Nook Tablet, and Kindle Fire have sold well. I don’t know whether the first is still true. I didn’t have time to take any effort away from the iOS app to do it myself, and I hadn’t found anyone else (who I could afford) who I’d trust to do it well.Android tablets were selling very poorly, but more than half of Instapaper’s business comes from the iPad because of its reading nature, so it seemed like working on an app mostly for a phone platform might not be worthwhile.I didn’t think there was enough of a market for paid Android phone apps.I always had three reasons not to develop Instapaper for Android myself: I talked a lot about the rationale behind this on the podcast this week. It’s now available in all three major Android stores: Google Play, Amazon Appstore for Android, and Nook Apps. They certainly could be useful to people who make a lot of use of their Kindles or other e-ink readers, and would like to read news articles there as well.A programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast. But now that they’re available for free, I’ll certainly take advantage of some of them. In any event, I never thought I would use enough of those premium services to make paying for Instapaper a consideration. Perhaps the most fitting analogy would be Amazon acquiring Goodreads but keeping Goodreads running just as it is, because the metadata Goodreads produces helps improve Amazon’s services. That’s the way tech companies work these days. The more people use the service, after all, the more useful metadata it will generate. Thus, it’s willing to subsidize those “low overhead” costs, even in terms of providing Premium service levels to everybody. So, apparently Pinterest believes it can make Pinterest even better by keeping Instapaper running as a metadata generator. Instapaper would only be providing general information on things like which articles were bookmarked the most times, with any personal or identifying information removed. Some users expressed concern that Pinterest might be mining personal data as part of that “aggregate information,” but Donohue explained that Instapaper’s privacy policy was not changing and would still be strictly honored. Instapaper rep Brian Donohue explained, “The value that Pinterest gets from Instapaper are improvements to our text parser and aggregate information about links on the web. In the blog post announcing the change, and discussion in the comments, the Instapaper team explained that they’re able to make this change because they have low operational overhead, and Pinterest sees value in keeping the service running. But I’ve never had any problem with the automatically-generated nightly digest.) (Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get the MOBI to download directly to my Kindle, due to some issue with their MOBI generation system not being compatible with the Kindle’s experimental web browser. These premium services include zero ads on site or mobile app, full-text search for all articles, unlimited use of the text-highlight notetaking feature and speed reading, text-to-speech playlists, a bookmarklet for emailing articles instantly to one’s Kindle without having to run them through the Instapaper site or app first, and the ability to have up to 50 articles included in the nightly “Kindle Digest” rather than the 10-article free-account limit. Instapaper also offers the ability to download MOBI or EPUB versions of your current document collection, as well as an experimental “make printable” option and an RSS feed. Those who’ve already paid for Instapaper premium accounts will have pro-rated refunds coming within the next week or so. Google and Amazon have done this countless times.īut rather than the usual case, in which the acquiring company shuts down the company it just bought (as was the case with Google and Etherpad, or Safari Books Online and Ibis Reader), Instapaper has announced exactly the opposite is happening: not only will Instapaper’s services be continuing, but the add-on services that formerly required paying for a premium account will now be freely available to everyone. A few months ago, Instapaper was acquired by Pinterest, in the usual tech-company deal we see these days when one company thinks that the technology another company developed would make its own products and services even better. My favorite article-clipping service just got even better.
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