![]() ![]() These features - often very easy for people but very hard for computers - often produce mediocre-at-best results, are never truly finished, and usually require massive time investments to achieve incremental progress with diminishing returns. This philosophy sounds simple, but it isn’t: geeks like us are always tempted to implement very complex, never-ending features because they’re academically or algorithmically interesting, or because they can add massive value if done well, such as speech or handwriting recognition, recommendation engines, or natural-language processing. As a result, Instapaper is a collection of a bunch of very easy things and only a handful of semi-hard things. The biggest design decision I’ve made is more of a continuous philosophy: do as few extremely time-consuming features as possible. Were there design decisions you made early on in order to manage that? What were they? You’re a one-man shop and are, among other things, developer, support, and operations - how do you pull that off? The top 10 saved domains are only about 11% of saved articles. But it’s only about 2% of all saved articles. ![]() The most-saved site is usually The New York Times, The Guardian, or another major traditional newspaper. Nearly everyone who guesses at Instapaper’s top-saved-domain list and its proportions is wrong. Most people assume that online readers primarily view a small number of big-name sites. What’s your favorite stat or fact regarding Instapaper? I had no idea it would get so big so quickly. Within days, it had thousands of users and was getting widespread acclaim. After a week of using it, they were already raving that it was amazing and it changed the way they read, so I gave it a few nights of polish and posted a simple link to it on my blog. I just used it myself and didn’t tell anyone for a few months. ![]() When did you know you had something viable on your hands? This was so the EDGE-only original iPhone could download them quickly and keep more tabs in RAM without needing to reload them when I was potentially underground and offline. Over the next couple of months, I added a few useful features, most notably the “text” mode to strip articles down to iPhone-formatted text. The original web app took only a single night to write. I never knew what to read on the train, but I’d find stuff all day at work that I didn’t have time to read, so I made Instapaper as a simple, one-click link-saving service for myself to time-shift links from the work day to my train commute. MARCO: In the fall of 2007, I had just switched to the iPhone, and I had a long train commute every day. RANDS: Where did the idea for Instapaper originate and how long until you had a usable product? I spoke with Marco via email to understand the origins of Instapaper, the valuable lessons he took from his first company - Tumblr - and how he manages one of web’s most useful sites as a one-man shop. In a world of exponentially increasing information, coupled with increasingly different ways of accessing it, the idea of investing in a social service that tells you precisely what your users care about strikes me as a no-brainer.įortunately, nature abhors a vacuum and Marco Arment’s Instapaper has deftly stepped in to replace Delicious. Yahoo’s strategic negligence is mind-boggling. Even with this rampant feature stagnation, I’d stuck with the site because it solved a daily need for me - bookmarks anywhere. Since its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005, the biggest user-facing change to the site was a visual refresh in 2008. If it doesn’t turn a profit within two months - just four issues - I’ll shut it down.On my list of horrendously bungled acquisitions, I put Delicious near the top. The Magazine covers “meaningful editorial and big-picture articles.” That’s the stuff we can all wait a month to read.īut Marco views this as an experiment, and is putting his chips on the table: I wonder, though, whether this boon to authors might not be detrimental to the outlet itself. ![]() This is basically a pay wall wrapped in an app, and it may well work. …The Magazine operates under liberal author terms: authors retain ownership of their writing, and they may republish it on their own sites just one month after it appears here. I’m downloading the app and will spend some time with it tonight, but perhaps the most interesting bit is Marco’s approach to acquiring great content. Four articles every two weeks, $1.99 a month. Today he is introducing The Magazine, an iOS app and fortnightly 1 publication. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, is probably public enemy number one in the publishing industry, and he’s at it again. ![]()
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