Instapaper

Instapaper is going independent (via 9to5Mac):

Today, we’re announcing that Pinterest has entered into an agreement to transfer ownership of Instapaper to Instant Paper, Inc., a new company owned and operated by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper since it was sold to betaworks by Marco Arment in 2013. The ownership transfer will occur after a 21 day waiting period designed to give our users fair notice about the change of control with respect to their personal information.

We want to emphasize that not much is changing for the Instapaper product outside the new ownership. The product will continue to be built and maintained by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper for the past five years. We plan to continue offering a robust service that focuses on readers and the reading experience for the foreseeable future.

Lastly, we want to express our deepest gratitude to Pinterest for being such great stewards of the product over the past two years. With their support, we rebuilt search, introduced an extension for Firefox, made a variety of optimizations for the latest mobile operating systems and more. Our focus is providing a great reading application to our users, we appreciated the opportunity to do that at Pinterest, and are excited to continue our work.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns please let us know by sending an email to support@help.instapaper.com or replying directly to this email.

– Instapaper Team

When I got my iPhone in 2008 one of my first wishes was an app that let me read articles from the Web while I was in the subway without Internet access. Then Instapaper came out and made my day.

I’m happy Pinterest sold Instapaper. They haven’t updated their own service, let alone Instapaper. Seriously, Pinterest has been coasting for at least 3 years with no feature updates.

Shame on them.