Pinstapaper ⇥ blog.instapaper.com
From the Instapaper blog:
Today, we’re excited to announce that Instapaper is joining Pinterest. In the three years since betaworks acquired Instapaper from Marco Arment, we’ve completely rewritten our backend, overhauled our mobile and web clients, improved parsing and search, and introduced tons of great features like highlights, text-to-speech, and speed reading to the product.
Marco Arment in 2013, in the post announcing that he had sold Instapaper to Betaworks:
Instapaper is much bigger today than I could have predicted in 2008, and it has simply grown far beyond what one person can do. To really shine, it needs a full-time staff of at least a few people. But I wouldn’t be very good at hiring and leading a staff, and after more than five years, I’d like an opportunity to try other apps and creative projects. Instapaper needs a new home where it can be staffed and grown, but I didn’t want to give it to a big company that would probably just shut it down in six months.
Brian Donahue of Betaworks:
Instapaper will continue to operate as a separate app and they will not be pushing some separate agenda that alters the app or user-experience.
The “we sold to Pinterest but nothing is changing” email is Instapaper’s equivalent of reassuring grandma about her move to a nursing home.
I’m worried about this. I’m a long-time Instapaper user and customer, and its features — particularly highlights and notes — are essential to my reading and research habits. But what happens six months from now? Will Pinterest really keep the app the same as it’s always been, given a reasonable level of overlap between the two services? That uncertainty leaves me feeling uneasy.