
The relationship between Readability and Instapaper - duck
http://www.marco.org/2011/11/16/readability
======
famousactress
I'm totally confused by the apparent consensus sentiment going around on this.
I adore Instapaper. I think it's unbelievably well done, I use it, and I don't
have plans to look elsewhere.. that said, I can't say I worry or get sad about
people who develop competing products.

Seriously?

It's ridiculous to react that way. First of all, I find it patronizing.
Marco's really fucking good at what he does. If it turns out that what he does
is easy enough for someone else to swoop in and do better easily, then what he
does isn't all that interesting. I doubt that's the case.

Second... fucking of course. This is how it works, and how it's supposed to
work. We're all consumers first, producers second. As consumers we benefit
from this mechanism CONSTANTLY, and the things we consume are directly
responsible for making the things we produce possible. We all got Facebook
from Myspace from Friendster... Look at your car, look at your appliances,
look at anything in your life. The ability to completely rip off shit and do
part of it a little better is where much more innovation comes from than
individual giant Big New Ideas. The folks that stay on top for prolonged
periods of time are folks who capitalize on that are able to do that
internally instead of resting on their laurels, and frankly Marco has proven
that tendency as well.

[Edit] Sorry, further. The point isn't what Instapaper (as a product) is
today, and this is exactly why small companies are great. It's what Marco is.
When I go down the street and buy fresh pasta from the place that's been
making it for longer than I've been alive, I'm not buying a product.. I'm
investing in a relationship... A relationship that I can trust to deliver me
compelling value on an ongoing basis. It's one thing to swoop in and build a
product that looks very much like one that's on the market (only free, or
whatever). That's not interesting to me. You haven't really accomplished
anything valuable. In fact, it's easy to argue you've literally sucked value
out of the world. It's another thing to replicate the ability to deserve
people's trust that you'll continue to deliver value in new ways... even if
the original source for your inspiration is gone (and especially if you were
to blame for it).

TL/DR: I ain't scurred.

[Edit] Downvote explanation anyone?

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joeguilmette
i down voted you because your comment was a little rambunctious and didn't
really make a whole lot of sense.

~~~
famousactress
Oh, well that's very fair. I'm kind of a handful.

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tzury

        They are certainly a direct competitor to Instapaper 
        now. But it didn’t catch me by surprise, and I hope 
        to still remain friendly with them.
    
        This is a very big and increasingly crowded market, 
        and there’s no reason why we can’t respectfully 
        share it.
    

Those are inspiring words, which I will keep in mind. It is a very healthy
approach toward competition and competitors, and I would rather adapt this one
instead of "we shall smash our competitors to death" which is more in common
(see all recent patent suites for instance)

~~~
davidu
It's not how things usually work out. Cisco and Juniper aren't friendly
competitors. They are each trying as hard as possible to destroy the other.
And the employees at each company feel the same. Less so at Cisco because they
are so much larger, but at Juniper, they are absolutely focused on "kill
Cisco."

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ronnier
The reason I don't develop my ViewText any further is that the barrier to
entry for this is just to low. Marco already has an excellent app, now
reability will enter his market, along with Apple.

Here's an example:
[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marco.org%2...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marco.org%2F2011%2F11%2F16%2Freadability&format=)

~~~
jorde
ViewText is really good. If you have stopped development, why not dump the
code to GitHub? Open source community could use a good text extractor as most
of the current ones are pretty bad on server side and Readability's old code
requires browser components to work well.

~~~
puzz
+1 for open sourcing it (from another ViewText user who also happened to need
good open source text extractor).

BTW, what programming language you used for ViewText?

~~~
ronnier
C#

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jphackworth
I love Instapaper, but it's especially interesting that Marco has been able to
compete against larger groups like Readability and Apple's Reading List. I'm
afraid it might be inevitable that he gets swamped by a constant stream of
competitive features, unless Instapaper expands beyond 1 employee.

~~~
omfg
But if it's just a 1 person company he can afford to stay small and still be
highly profitable.

Additionally Readability has stated that they're still figuring out their
business model, where as Marco has had a steady income for a long time now.
It's entirely possible that Readability vanishes in a few years and Instapaper
is still around.

~~~
kennywinker
Agreed. From a casual observer's perspective Readability seems to have failed
at a good idea and is now switching direction with no clear goal.

Evernote, however, has a pretty clear business model.

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tszming
I might be wrong, but isn't Instapaper is using the Readability's technology
to process HTML and make it more readable?
(<http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs-readability/>).

~~~
Xuzz
No, it uses a custom scraper written by Marco. I've found that both of them
work better on some pages and worse on others.

(However, I do believe the "Safari Reader" feature of iOS 5 and Safari 5
_does_ use Readability to extract the contents.)

~~~
kennywinker
The "Reader" button appears to be a fork of Readability
([http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/08/think-safari-
re...](http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/08/think-safari-reader-looks-
familiar-thats-because-apple-used-op/))

Also of note, the original Readability was actually "partly inspired by"
instapaper (<http://lab.arc90.com/2009/03/02/readability/>)

~~~
nikcub
So I looked into all of these some time ago for an app that I use myself. The
Safari fork of Readability is the best client implementation, while the best
server-side implementation (by a mile) is Diffbot.

Out of the 50 sources I had (regular RSS updates, etc.) InstaPaper failed on
far too many, either stripping important content or pictures and captions.
Readability was only a bit better

I glued together an app that will pull in RSS, send each URL to diffbot, and
then collate the output into a reader that I use. Never thought of releasing
it as an app, I just use it myself.

~~~
tszming
Readability's code is a little bit old (2009), but seems no other better
(opensource) alternatives...

And thanks for suggesting Diffbot, will try later.

~~~
albertogh
C implementation and Python bindings, opensourced one hour ago
<https://github.com/fiam/readable>

~~~
abrowne
Maybe the name is generic enough, but I'm wondering if you're aware of
Readable[1].

[1]: <http://readable.tastefulwords.com/>

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joeguilmette
Offline reading and (more importantly) multiplatform support is going to keep
me with Instapaper. The fact that I can get Instapaper articles to my Kindle
is something that I know Apple is never going to offer. Ever. Now, if Apple
offered an eInk Ereader that synced with Reading List (and offline support for
Reading List) for less than $100 then maybe I'd jump ship.

In all honesty there would need to be a VERY compelling feature set at a low
(free) price for Instapaper to lose me. I've already bought the iOS apps and
incorporated the service into my flow.

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ChrisArchitect
wow, and this didn't even touch on Evernote's Clearly. Busy day in the 'easy
mobile reading' space.

~~~
abrowne
Which appears to be derived from Readable[1], based on how the reading view
slides over the page and some comments in the extension's js files.

[1]: <http://readable.tastefulwords.com/>

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orionlogic
Last time i use Readability it was too slow and stop using it. Original idea
one was instant. So i use Readable most of the time. And sometimes i combine
(Instapaper Text + Safari Read list). Speed is important, other features are
secondary.

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scorpion032
tl;dr: "Competition is good; It motivates me to keep my offering better"

There are in numerous Basecamp clones out there, yet a handful of them manage
to do a percent of the revenues Basecamp does.

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llimllib
I guess it's weird that I often instapaper pages I've readability-ed?

~~~
berberich
I do the same thing, usually with multi-page articles, since Readability will
stitch pages into one long one before I save to Instapaper.

~~~
joeguilmette
Instapaper automagically stitches paginated articles together.

~~~
rkudeshi
No, it doesn't.

<http://www.marco.org/2011/07/19/siracusa-multipage>

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joeguilmette
so it does. holy shit. i wonder how many articles I've only read a piece of
because I thought Instapaper was stitching!

~~~
lyso
Exactly. It is a problem - I respect that Marco doesn't want to stich articles
together, but I sometimes reach the end of an article to find myself unsure as
to whether that really was the end, or just the end of page one. Would be
useful to get some indication in Instapaper when this is the case. I am
flirting with Readability for this reason.

~~~
berberich
One Chrome (and Safari) extension that I found helps is called Page One
[[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pojkjlgamiogkhagab...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pojkjlgamiogkhagabbejodnkcnnbfdb)].
It will automatically redirect your browser to the single-page/print view for
a number of popular sites (21 as of today).

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recoiledsnake
>In February of this year, the app was finished and ready to launch, but it
was rejected by Apple for the in-app-purchase subscription-matching rule,
which had just gone into effect. Readability decided that they didn’t want to
give Apple the 30%, so the app was put on hold and soon cancelled once it was
obvious that nobody was budging.

Readability didn't decide they didn't want to give 30%, they just couldn't
because then Apple would end up with _all_ of Readability's revenues.

~~~
hullo
I was firmly on Readability's side on that, but don't lose site of the fact
that Readability set their own business model. They're willing to cut their
take to 0% now, they just weren't willing to do it then. The difference being
before content creators would have gotten 70%. Now they get 0. (For the
general, publicized case).

Back in February they could have easily revised their own plan, to take 70% of
net rather than gross, say.

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feir
A lot of imaginations among the announcements between Instapaper and
Readability.

