Popular clipping site Pinterest announced on Tuesday, August 23, the takeover of offline reading service Instapaper.
Instapaper Acquired By Pinterest
Pinterest has decided to absorb offline reading service Instapaper in order to improve its own bookmarking service. The acquisition has been announced on an Instapaper company blog.
As part of the deal, the Instapaper team will integrate Pinterest team and work both on updating Instapaper and improving the core Pinterest experience. The Instapaper app will continue operating as a separate app.
In a statement for Bloomberg, Pinterest officials explained that the acquisition of the offline reading service Instapaper fits with company's aim of serving better content that matches user interests. Steve Davis, the site's product manager, added that the Instapaper team will work with Pinterest in order to build better recommendations and indexing technologies.
According to Tech Crunch, Pinterest's logic with this acquisition has the same core focus on bookmarking as Instapaper's primary goal with its app. In the past few months, Pinterest has been on an aggressive acquisition binge. For instance, the team behind Highlight and Shorts has been acquired by Pinterest in July.
According to Apple Insider, Instapaper elaborated on the takeover, saying that Pinterest will experiment with its parsing technology for "certain Rich Pin types." And the move would contribute to Pinterest's "discovery products." Instapaper's main service will continue to operate but the Instaparser service catering for developers will shut down. The company has also halted billing and new signups. The Instapaper platform will be kept running only until Nov. 1.
Instapaper Offline Reading Service
One of the last major updated to Instapaper offline reading service happened in May last year. Since then, we haven't heard much about its app in a while. A lot of the same functionality pioneered by Instapaper's offline reading app has found its way into other core user experiences.
Instapaper provided one of the original "save it for later" offline reader applications. Its offline reading service has built up a mentality around being able to hold for longer onto content without the risk of missing it or skipping over it. Instapaper app was holding high rankings in the news category in the App Store after it became an early popular application on the iPhone.