
Mozilla Acquires Pocket - qdot76367
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/
======
anexprogrammer
Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and can acquire startups.

Mozilla doesn't have the resources to continue with Thunderbird.

I am increasingly baffled by their decisions and how they relate to the
strategic plans [0] they've been producing for a while. Despite the worthy
words in their plan they seem to have no sense of direction. That saddens me.

That said I'm happier having Pocket as an open source part of Mozilla/Firefox
than a surprise integration of a commercial app.

[0] [https://wiki.mozilla.org/MoFo_2020](https://wiki.mozilla.org/MoFo_2020)

~~~
BinaryIdiot
To be fair Thunderbird is awful. Every single time I try to find a better
client I see someone suggesting "oh Thunderbird has gotten way better; give it
a shot! I love it!" and every time I fall for it and it's the same slow,
horrible application that I've tried again and again.

I'm all for them killing it.

~~~
jacquesm
My 1K+ folders and millions of archived emails disagree with you. I've yet to
find a client that works as well as Thunderbird with my massive email archive.

Why would it be slow? I can only type so fast and sending/receiving mail is
mostly dependent on the connectivity, not on the software.

~~~
webwanderings
I recently downloaded TB to move some offline mbox emails of large quantity.
TB became increasingly slow processing few thousand. I downloaded Opera Mail
to do the same exact work. I was done within few hours.

I have a need for more people to repeat the same process. There's zero chance
I'll be asking them to download TB.

~~~
jacquesm
Thunderbird sets up a full-text index to allow you to search your emails. This
eats up a bit of time while importing large mailboxes but is quite handy once
it is done.

~~~
webwanderings
I tried that (I googled to see what am I missing) didn't help.

------
niftich
Oh, what a twist!

In a story that began two years ago with Pocket's integration by Mozilla [1]
in Firefox [2], large segments of the userbase spoke out with scathing
criticism.

This, at first blush, appears unrelated: Mozilla previously announced its
Context Graph initiative, which was a bold undertaking to be built partially
upon a new and emerging set of W3C standards to take back some of the control
over linkage, metadata, and the consumption and annotation of web content [3]
from big incumbent providers who run content portals, content silos, or
content aggregators (largely the usual suspects, including Google, Facebook
[4], Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo [5]).

To understand this play, temporarily forget about Mozilla the Foundation, and
think about Mozilla as a strategic competitor to the above. In the case of
Pocket, a hard-to-deny side effect is that Pocket's presence in Firefox,
despite the exact nature of the integration, is likely here to stay. While
this is bound to frustrate many, Mozilla's competitors routinely ship software
or entire platforms with tight captive integrations, against which competition
has proven difficult to mount solely on the merits of values and philosophical
purity.

[1]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=firefox%20pocket](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=firefox%20pocket)
[2]
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mozilla%20pocket](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mozilla%20pocket)
[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525#13740110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525#13740110)
[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375451#13375917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375451#13375917)
[5]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493)

~~~
omouse
My only problem with Pocket was that it was proprietary and it was integrated
with Firefox. If it's released under and open source license, then I'll be
glad to have it integrated.

Pocket makes Mozilla competitive on mobile because Firefox's market share on
mobile is very low.

~~~
rhelmer
The client-side portion of Pocket has always been open-source.

If you mean the server-side then fair enough, maybe this acquisition will help
with that.

~~~
mcintyre1994
It looks like their Firefox addon has ([https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-ff-
addon](https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-ff-addon)), and I guess by definition
you can get the source of their Chrome addon and getpocket.com, but I don't
think they meet the definition of open source unless they're somewhere other
than Github. Also their mobile apps seem to be closed source too.

~~~
rhelmer
The built-in Pocket feature is an addon that is pre-installed into Firefox:

[https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-
central/source/browser/exten...](https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-
central/source/browser/extensions/pocket)

~~~
Sylos
Yeah, but there's for example also a Pocket Android app and iOS app. Those
should get open-sourced now, too, and I heavily doubt that they were before.

~~~
rhelmer
I agree!

------
apetresc
Something I've always wished Pocket would do is download an offline copy of
videos I add to the list (using, say, youtube-dl [1]), so I can watch them on
the subway, etc. But they never did this, presumably either for legal reasons,
or because it was a giant waste of bandwidth considering a huge percentage of
Pocketed articles never get read.

Now that Mozilla is promising to open-source this, I eagerly await adding this
feature to my own fork :)

\-- [1]: [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-
dl/)

~~~
tertius
See Youtube red.

~~~
alainv
Youtube Red is not available in most of the world:

> available in the United States, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand and South
> Korea.

~~~
tertius
I guess they'll have to wait.

------
SwellJoe
Pocket, for me, is a weird product/feature. I've tried to use it, but it ends
up just being like a clumsy bookmarking feature.

Allegedly, you can read things offline, but that feature never works for me.
It seems the feature for offline reading doesn't exist at all in Firefox
(which I'd assumed was the point of its integration, but my assumption was
wrong), and I've tried the Chrome desktop app and the Android mobile app
..nothing I save to pocket is ever readable without a data connection. It must
work for some content for some people because I see people talking about it
like it does. But, without that feature I see literally no utility in
Pocket...it's just a clunky bolted-on bookmark manager, and so I end up going
back to bookmarks with tags. I use Sync and I have Firefox on all of my
devices. So, my bookmarks go with me.

So, I guess it's good that it's going open source. I wasn't comfortable with
the way integration was presented back when they added it...it wasn't at all
apparent, to me, that Pocket was a third party for-profit entity when the
"setup your pocket" process launched in Firefox, since I'd never heard of it
before that. But, it still seems like a solution looking for a problem. I'll
give it another look. Maybe I was just unlucky with my choices of what to
save...but it seems like if offline reading is not going to work on a page
(for whatever reason) it should warn you. It'd suck to get on a train/plane or
get lost in the woods, with plans to catch up on some reading, only to find
there's nothing there.

But, maybe that's not even the primary purpose of Pocket? I dunno, it's still
pretty fuzzy to me wtf it's for, if not that.

~~~
sharkbot
The Kobo ereaders have had Pocket integration for a while now, and it works
great offline. My usual routine is to find interesting articles on Hacker
News, and if they are longer than a page or two, click the Pocket button and
read them at home on the ereader. A few don't render well (the article on
Arrival/Story of your Life not being a time-travel story was a recent fail),
but generally it works great.

~~~
forevercrashing
_the article on Arrival /Story of your Life not being a time-travel story was
a recent fail_

Loved the book / movie but haven't read that article. Do you have the link?
Thanks.

~~~
terminus
Probably this one:
[https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life](https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life)

------
wodenokoto
I've always liked Pocket, but felt queasy about its integration with Firefox.

I consider this a great move for a better bookmarking experience in Firefox as
well as a better pocket service.

~~~
toyg
It is ridiculous though. Mozilla already had a sync infrastructure, it didn't
need another service just for bookmarks, "only" a decent additional UI.

To me, the whole Pocket thing always smelled of cronyism. Someone is friend
with someone else, and lo, Pocket appears. People get all angry, Pocket's
hockey-stick fails to materialise, and lo, Mozilla bail them out...

~~~
alphapapa
Not only that, but the original Read-It-Later extension did exactly that: it
stored links directly in Firefox's bookmarks system in a "Read-It-Later"
folder. Only later did it begin using its own, separate database.

------
grappler
Pocket's post about the acquisition, referring to the main value their product
brings, says, “a platform where high-quality, thoughtful content and free
speech can rise above the rest.”

Pocket used to have a feature aimed at surfacing high-quality content from the
collection of things a user had already pocketed. They removed that feature. I
was paying for their premium service before that change. After they removed
it, I stopped the premium subscription because I wasn't sure what pocket's
value to me was anymore.

Now they have a recommender that recommends things you _haven 't_ pocketed
yet. But that just encourages the user to accumulate an ever larger collection
of pocketed things, not surface the best things in that collection.

Ever since, I've reflexively kept saving things to pocket, hoping they would
bring that feature back. But the only practical thing I have done with it is
pull up something I just saved recently, because it will be near the top of
the list.

Pocket's CEO also writes, “In fact, we have a few major updates up our sleeves
that we are really excited to get into your hands in the coming months.” I
hope they will bring that feature, or something with a similar aim, back.

~~~
dredmorbius
OK, so it's not just me imagining things.

My view is pretty much as yours: _POCKET IS MY VETTED WEB._ If I've saved
stuff there, it's because _that is shit I 've already determined is worth a
second look, and I want to be able to find it again._

Increasingly, when I hit my Pocket archive (3k-4k+ items, top 1% user), I find
that _I cannot find what I 'm looking for._ This negates approximately 80% of
the purpose of having Pocket in the first place, and I've been giving strong
thoughts to simply using it as a link dump until I can figure out how to:

1\. Download the content myself.

2\. Download the tags, which are the most important element.

3\. Get the simplified-Web view. Web design isn't the solution, Web design is
the problem.

4\. Be able to search and filter _specifically what I 've already fetched_.
And filter by more options: date, website, author, tags (positive and negative
filters), etc.

None of that currently exists. And it is increasingly frustrating.

~~~
davidp670
+1 for searching and filtering. I use Bookmark OS for this. It's more desktop
oriented but the sorting and visual nature really helps me browse what I've
already bookmarked. [https://bookmarkos.com](https://bookmarkos.com)

~~~
dredmorbius
Interesting.

I've just started speccing out some thoughts on how document references
(files, URLs, URIs, ...?) might be improved. A sort of api / multiple-
attribute interface strikes me as useful:

1\. Meaningful titles / filenames.

2\. A content hash. Not exactly human-friendly... I'd prefer something shorter
to longer, though there's the collisions problem. Still thinking on this.
Could tie into VCS (git, Hg, etc.)

3\. Various standard metadata: author(s), editor(s), publisher(s), and their
relation(s) to the doc. See various bibliographic or MARC 21 formats.

4\. Dates: Initiated, published, modified, accessed, read date(s).

5\. Classification schema. Here with time I find that working with _extant_
rather than de novo or ad hoc schema is most likely preferable. Dewey Decimal
is apparently more logical than LoCCS, but the Library of Congress
classification is nonproprietary. That may well be what makes it win out.

6\. Workflow indicators. Unread, read, deep-archive, to-process, etc.

7\. Reputation and ratings. Associated with works, authors, other contributors
(editors, fact-checkers, etc.), publishers. Some form of distributed
assessment here would be useful.

The question is how to make these visible. My thought is to treat the
parameters as, essentially, search. It doesn't matter _what_ name you use, so
long as the _set_ characteristics is unique _or determinable_. E.g., returning
3 items would allow me to manually determine which I'm interested in,
returning 300 would make that difficult, returning 3,000 would probably
require some programmatic determination (or further specification).

A URL scheme, say, URI:/au=clarke&dat=lt:1980&ti: _=imperial &ti_=earth ...
could, say, return Arthur C. Clarke's _Imperial Earth_.

A filesystem / virtual filesystem approach might work somewhat similarly
locally, either from a CLI or graphical approach. I'm thinking of how that
might work....

Very early stages.

------
zyngaro
"We believe that the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content
is key to keeping the internet healthy by fighting against the rising tide of
centralization and walled gardens" that alone is a reason to welcome this
aquisition. Facebook has become for many, me included the entry point to the
web much more so than the browser and I really don't like that. I can imagine
Mozilla suggest content to users based in what they have saved in the past on
pocket and integration with Firefox. Nice move.

~~~
hkmurakami
I suppose then that the strategy will be "the browser as a platform" vs "FB as
a platform", with the technical difference that all FF tools will be open
source?

That actually sounds promising. Next logical content vertical would be video
then (judging from FB's content importance)

------
Touche
This is weird. Has Mozilla acquired any startups in the past? Feels weird to
me for a browser non-profit to own a web app product.

~~~
smacktoward
It _is_ weird - the press release itself notes that this is the first such
acquisition Mozilla has ever made.

In their defense, it won't be the first time they've gotten into operating a
service -- there's Sync, for instance. So if they see expanding FF's
bookmarking abilities as a key strategic differentiator, buying an existing
read-it-later service they're already familiar with could be a simpler/cheaper
way of getting there than building one from scratch.

~~~
st3fan
First acquisition but not first investment. For example see
[https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-
makes-s...](https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-makes-
strategic-investment-in-cliqz-to-enable-privacy-focused-search-innovation/)

~~~
cpeterso
Mozilla also joined Everything.me's Series C funding round:

[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/11/28/mozilla-invests-
in-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/11/28/mozilla-invests-in-
everything-me/)

------
bttf
I have been working on a prototype for a competitor to Pocket and other save-
for-later services with an emphasis on minimalism, privacy and ease of use.

[https://slushi.es](https://slushi.es)

Very early app, features are rolling out daily. My end goal is to build a
recommendation engine out of user data, while keeping things anonymous.

Although social bookmarking has been done plenty times before, I think
execution has been sub-par in previous solutions. My aim is to make things
streamlined and fast for the user to go from 'what was that link?' to 'there
it is' (sidenote: check out slushi.es opensearch, and how it behaves when
there's one result (only works for signed-in users)).

A complaint I hear often from Pocket users (and other save-for-later users
alike) is that they will save 100s of links without ever going back to reading
them. I, too, shared the same sentiment until one day I experienced a 'what
was that link again?' moment. It was rare and fleeting at the time, but since
using slushi.es more and more, those moments have appeared with increasing
frequency.

I believe the best save-for-later app will transform the regular web browsing
individual's habits of reading an article and forgetting about it, to reading
an article and remembering it later; either a day later, a month later, or
perhaps years. The thing is remembering. I think a good save-for-later app
works as a memory reinforcer; something that augments your ability to build
and recall knowledge.

~~~
UnfalseDesign
It doesn't sound like you are a competitor for Pocket. It sounds like you are
a competitor to Diigo. You might want to re-evaluate who your competitors are
and do a SWOT analysis of them.

~~~
bttf
thanks for the tip. diigo is definitely a competitor (was noticed by our
analysis a long time ago but attention to it has fell by the wayside). pocket
seems like the biggest whale, so naturally have pinned it as one of our
competitors. i think any save-for-later app that introduces discoverability is
a competitor

------
philfrasty
I have used Pocket for the last five years or so. 99.5% of the articles I
bookmark every day I never actually read. Probably should make me think why I
use it at all...

~~~
splintercell
I read A LOT on pocket (they sent me an email that I was one of their top 1%
readers, with having read 1.7 million words).

For me it's a great time saver, I see some interesting article during work,
but instead of wasting my time on it during work, I save it for later. Granted
I get no signal during the subway where Pocket becomes a really useful app,
but it results in me being a lot more efficient with reading.`

~~~
kilroy123
Same here.

------
cpeterso
The Firefox bug to open source Pocket: [https://bugzil.la/open-
pocket](https://bugzil.la/open-pocket)

------
chrisabrams
As a former del.ici.ous engineer and user, I'm happy to see that Pocket will
be in good hands for a while :)

~~~
r721
Is there any chance you know what's happening with delicious now? Their last
blog post is dated "April 24, 2016" [1], and they are silent on Facebook since
May 2016 too [2] despite loads of comments.

[1] [http://blog.del.icio.us/?p=1193](http://blog.del.icio.us/?p=1193)

[2]
[https://www.facebook.com/delicious/posts/10153614657337205](https://www.facebook.com/delicious/posts/10153614657337205)

~~~
jccalhoun
a year or two they went down for about a week. That was the final straw for me
and pushed me to pay for pinboard.in. I haven't looked back since. it just
works and I don't worry about it going down or going away.

------
kennymeyers
Pocket is one of my favorite products to use. Congratulations to the team!

------
dleslie
As I do a fair amount of offline reading, I'm a fan of pocket.

------
ttam
Dear Mozilla, I'd love to help out with Pocket.

As a concerned user, I even wrote this a few months ago
[http://constantbetasoftware.com/2016/09/02/pocket.html](http://constantbetasoftware.com/2016/09/02/pocket.html)

How can I apply?

~~~
callahad
Pocket is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Corporation, so Pocket
retains a great deal of autonomy within their organization. Since Mozilla
acquired the entire team, I'd start by reaching out to the individuals listed
on [https://getpocket.com/about/](https://getpocket.com/about/).

Longer term, my understanding is that we want to use Pocket's expertise and
data to help build a recommendation engine for the open Web (Context Graph:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Context_Graph](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Context_Graph)).
This speaks directly to the problem of sites like Instagram which restrict
links to external sites: users can enter via URLs, but they can't navigate
away. (More reading:
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-
blo...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blogfather-
facebook-instagram-and-twitter-are-killing-the-web)). If anything could help
users route themselves out of these silos, it'd be a huge win for the openness
of the Web.

~~~
just_testing
Thanks, I'll try to get in touch with them.

I'd love to help on the recommendation engine. I'm (for two years now) at the
top 1% of users.

I also happen to live in Brazil, to be a native portuguese speaker and the
recommendation system absolutely sucks. I get a lot of articles regarding
startups and Trump, but absolutely nothing in portuguese and/or about Brazil.

------
hkmurakami
I was shocked to read the news since afaik Mozilla had never made acquisitions
like this in the past (which they mention in the post).

I'm excited though, since the reason I hadn't used Pocket in the past was
because I didn't want to be part of yet another walled garden (YAWG?).

A quick look at Crunchbase shows that they'd raised $14.5M from investors.
Given Mozilla's ~$300M of annual revenue, I wonder whether this leans towards
an acquihire or a technology/product acquisition (definitely not a business
acquisition). Difficult for me to assess the significance of 10M users for a
company like Mozilla.

~~~
tedmiston
My general rule of thumb is that if they don't announce a price it's an
acquihire.

------
dochtman
I'll keep saying that Mozilla should acquire Fastmail.

Now that would be a strategic acquisition.

~~~
gkoberger
There's a joke at Mozilla that "Opera did it first". Pretty much every new
feature in Firefox, Chrome, etc has appeared first in Opera.

In this case: [https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/opera-
fastmail/](https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/30/opera-fastmail/)

~~~
toxican
Funny how far Opera has fallen these past few years. Years ago it was setting
trends with tabs. Now it's yet another Chromium-based browser.

------
KarlFreeman
It's fairly early stage but I've been actively building an alternative to
Pocket called Filltray ([https://filltray.com](https://filltray.com)). I found
myself being overwhelmed by products like Pocket/Instapaper so wanted to build
something different. A place to keep things for "short" periods of time but
without the baggage of having 100s of items permanently on your never-ending
reading list. A "do-later" place that may or might not come around. A couple
months ago I put up a public roadmap ([https://medium.com/filltray/public-
product-roadmap-3964c3fa4...](https://medium.com/filltray/public-product-
roadmap-3964c3fa4398)) and I'm continuing to work hard to produce a product
which meets mine — and I think others — needs for a rethink on read-later.
Please feel free to follow @filltray to keep up to date with my progress :)!

------
resfirestar
The first thing I do with a new Firefox install is remove the Pocket button,
but I still welcome the prospect of seeing the Pocket service becoming open
source and part of Firefox Sync. There are definitely some interesting ideas
around the Context Graph, and hopefully the Pocket team will be able help move
the project forward.

------
nkkollaw
My impression is that most things that Mozilla starts, they shut down.

I was following their experiments, and they shut all of them down while some
of them were already working.

I used to use Thunderbird years ago, but they completely stopped working on
it.

I just hope they don't kill Pocket, since I use it every day to save things to
read later.

------
shmerl
That's interesting. I see they plan to open source it. I might even use it
after that.

------
bearcobra
Does this mark a strategy shift away from search revenue as the primary
funding source? A quick crunchbase search for other aquicisions by Mozilla
yeilded nothing, so I'm curious if there are other examples of them buying up
for-profits.

~~~
ygjb
The only other example is the hiring of three co-founders of Humanized,
[https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/breaking-mozilla-buying-
hu...](https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/breaking-mozilla-buying-humanized/)

------
bharani_m
This is an interesting development. I am curious to see how they take this
integration forward. Specifically, I have questions whether it will still have
a Premium component or will it be made completely open-source.

For those interested in an alternative, I am currently building a simpler
bookmarking tool [1] that works pretty much exactly like Pocket or Instapaper.
Email This will extract useful content from a page and send it to you via
email instead of you having to download an additional app or login to another
service to access your bookmarks.

[1] [https://www.emailthis.me](https://www.emailthis.me)

------
adultSwim
I think this is great. I'm weary of add-ons/extensions so only run a couple
(which are from providers I trust)

I didn't really trust my saved article data to a random startup. Being under
Mozilla means now I'll actually use it.

------
gnicholas
I use Pocket differently than most people here. I never save articles to
Pocket — I just use their Recommended engine to find interesting articles to
read. Some of these come from sources I regularly read (NYT), but others come
from obscure sources or big sources that I tend not to read for whatever
reason. In a small way, it helps me get news from outside my bubble, and
sometimes I'll end up reading regularly from a source I discover through
Pocket.

My only complaint is that a large portion of the Recommended content is junk
from Business Insider. Hopefully this will wane as Mozilla's priorities are
implemented.

~~~
dredmorbius
The ability to blacklist sources would be fucking awesome.

I'm mostly limited to firewalling domains at my router. Doesn't stop them from
turning up on, e.g., Web search.

------
bravura
Can Pocket please finally support Facebook links to non-Facebook context? And
just strip the Facebook URL junk?

Otherwise, you have to click on a FB link to get the unmangled URL, thus
counting against your number of free views every month.

~~~
dredmorbius
Incognito mode.

Or Archive.is

------
Scea91
I've used Pocket in the past but when I started using Evernote I discovered
that I do not need Pocket anymore. Is there any killer feature that I do not
know about that Pocket offers and Evernote doesn't?

------
wirddin
Huge fan of the Pocket App. Any guesses for how much the deal would be worth?

------
dewiz
When they add ML clustering to one's pages, so that I stop using bookmarks,
and find useful stuff automatically grouped together, plus
recommendations...then perhaps I'll start using it

------
mark_l_watson
It sounds like a good plan, making Firefox a platform for organizing
information while web browsing, research, etc.

A question: what advantages privacy-wise does Firefox have over Safari on iPad
and macOS? I frequently delete all cookies on Safari and set strong privacy
options. I ask because I have transitioned in the last year or so to working
on my iPad and MacBook, largely letting my Linux boxes collect dust. On Linux,
using Firefox was an easy decision. On iPad and MacBook, Safari is more
convenient.

------
vivekd
I use pocket because it is automatically synced with my Kobo e-reader. One
thing I wish they would offer is folders. Before I bought the kobo I stuck
with instapaper just because of the cleaner interface and the option to use
folders.

I get that pocket offers the option to tag, but different people have
different preferences and folders would be nice.

Also a bunch of large squares doesn't seem to be the best way to organize
information consisting of web blogs and pictures.

Hopefully mozilla will make some UX changes to pocket.

------
no_wizard
I never used pocket, but I use instapaper.

I wonder if Pocket will be completely free now or if mozilla counts on this to
fund more of its efforts. Beyond that. I also wonder if this means a read it
later service will finally properly support RSS. Forgive me I don't know the
features of pocket but as i understand it is does not correct?

I been using the built in firefox RSS feeder for years. with pocket
integration it'd be a lot more useful.

------
rocky1138
If you're interested in using Pocket in Chrome/Chromium but aren't ready to
hand over the insane amount of permissions required for their official
extension, you can run the Add to Pocket (mini) extension.

[https://johnrockefeller.net/use-pocket-without-being-
tracked...](https://johnrockefeller.net/use-pocket-without-being-tracked/)

------
codeisawesome
I LOVE POCKET! I'm only very happy to hear that it's Mozilla who has bought
them. Warm feelings of security and privacy.

------
AJRF
I was wishing Pocket would offer AWS Polly playback for articles, so I started
making my own app to do it. Now that it is going open source I might just
piggy back their parser as its a good bit better than mine.

Hope they build in some Context Graph projects into Pocket, as there is some
great ideas their.

------
Roritharr
After this, why should I donate to Mozilla? I really don't get what's the
difference between donating to Mozilla and donating to Facebook. Facebook
open-sources some of their stuff. Facebook buys companies to generate
revenues... I guess Mozilla doesn't need help anymore.

~~~
callahad
Donations to "Mozilla" go to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which does
exceptional, meaningful work. Firefox is developed by the Foundation's self-
funding, for-profit subsidary, the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo). MoCo acquired
Pocket, using its own funds.

For legal / tax reasons, MoCo can only push a tiny fraction of its revenue up
into the Foundation. This means that donations are necessary to sustain the
Foundation's initiatives.

~~~
hkmurakami
I feel like sufficiently large numbers of people are confused about the
arrangement of the company and the foundation (I definitely don't know the
details of the money flow between the two), that this warrants some kind of
easily referable page on Mozilla's website.

(appreciate you clarifying this here)

------
leopld
I think it would be great if they looked into merging the existing bookmarks
system with Pocket!

------
SZJX
Seems that the user data/behavioral patterns is really always the most
important thing for this type of services huh? The aim was mostly to get
acquired and it seems that the acquirer always has an eye on the vast amount
of data etc.

------
1wheel
I hope they'll remove some of the "growth-hacker" stuff from the chrome
extension. Modifying the new tab page and injecting links on pages by default
is super annoying.

------
phs
I've been lately dissatisfied with pocket and related apps for lacking some
admittedly fringe features.

The possibility of adding them myself without rebuilding the whole app is
exciting!

------
jslakro
Yeah! At last I can change Feedly! Any advice before migrating?

------
xyos
what will happen to pocket premium?

~~~
m52go
did anyone buy pocket premium? i always perceived it as a sales page that got
no sales.

~~~
hgontijo
I did. Mostly because I like/use the tool and I wanted to support their work.

~~~
pspeter3
I did for the same reasons and also in the hope of having advanced search.

------
hitlin37
this is really great news. i like pocket integration on kobo aura one. i hope
they keep making that integration improvements further.

------
dredmorbius
I hope this is good news.

I've been using Pocket for a couple of years, and am a top-1% user. It's been
useful, though also highly frustrating, and is at best only about a 50%
solution.

I've provided considerable feedback to Pocket over issues and features. Over
the course of a couple of years, few if any of them appear to be addressed,
which has been highly disheartening. (Any Pocket folk: I'm "dredmorbius" at
gmail, though not in my account, which is otherwise attributed, because, you
know, privacy, Kristalnacht, Snowden, etc., etc.)

I'd previously used Readability, which was nice in fixing a primary problem of
online content: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. But
_that_ service shut down, on 30 days notice (though with loud signs for the
previous couple of years) last September. I spent several days largely
manually transferring information out of Readability (404 links meant that a
straight export wasn't useful -- I had to track down alternative references
where possible). I'm hoping I don't have to go through that again.

I've looked at other alternatives: Instapaper (no compelling use case),
Pinboard.in, by our very own @idlewords (his comment below was ... not
particularly useful). Upshot: without a very specific walkthrough of the
product, I can't tell if it's worth my time, and my time would be a week or
month of trying to reconstruct the structure I already have in Pocket, in
Pinboard. I've visited the "Tour" link multiple times, and no, it isn't clear
that this offers me anything useful.

I'm thinking that RMS's model of having an email-based web-requesting systsem
might actually be more useful than anything else. A Mutt (or Emacs mail-mode)
searchable, taggable archive, date-sorted, threadable/groupable, would be a
huge win over a lot of other alternatives. I've been thinking through other
ways in which I might create my own self-hosted archive repository.

Zotero is another option, though again, I can't quite penetrate the use model
/ workflow.

In both cases, the prospect of being stuck with as-published layouts rather
than as-useful layouts (have I mentioned: Web design isn't the solution, Web
design is the problem) is disheartening.

I'd really like to have an offline / commandline tool which could manage
webpage decrufting. I'm aware that it's not a fully deterministic process --
the problem with the Web, for better or worse (I've been suspecting the latter
for some time) is that there are no publishing standards, and content follows
no consistent form. That said, much content can be divided into two general
categories: 1) known states of fucked up and 2) unknown states of fucked up.
Growing the size of category one, and taking the hopeless cases and simply
stripping _all_ markup from it and starting from scratch (something I do
myself, manually, far more often than I care to think) is a semi-reasonable
approach.

I've written a few times on what's plaguing the Web (as have others, Maciej's
rants are particulalry recommended).

Tabbed browsing: a band-aid:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/)

The Reference Management Problem:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/50o1jv/the_ref...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/50o1jv/the_references_management_problem_readability/)

And some general feedback (wrapped around some specific feedback) to Pocket:
[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/3eucmp_s0tumjuoxmfclbw](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/3eucmp_s0tumjuoxmfclbw)

(Yes, it's heavy on the caps and asterisks -- it's difficult otherwise to
indicate important points in email. SoKookMeHarder...)

Borrowing from that last:

Don't put solving your own problems ahead of solving those of your users.

The features I do use, heavily, and would like to see improved, are article
view (many websites remain glitchy, I'm well aware this is a whackamole
problem, but it does need to be continually addressed), import (I've been
working through a backlog of 2,000+ Readability articles migrating to Pocket,
slowly, one-at-a-time, there's no automated tool), bulk-action tools, sub-
corpus tools (working on a specific set of articles at a time), and tags tags
tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags tags
tags tags (did I say tags) tags tags tags. And more tags.

A principle, perhaps the principle problem with the Web as it stands is
organisation particularly as concerns quality and vetted content.

There are various sources who can vet content. Some are good. There's one I
especially trust, and whose judgement over what I like is strong: ME.

I've commented before, AND CONTINUE TO HUGELY APPRECIATE several features of
Pocket, especially the ability to peform full-text searches of my current and
archived articles. It's HUGE.

One of my (many) interests is COGNITIVE LOAD. Pocket is a tool for REDUCING
COGNITIVE LOAD when reading online media. I see several mechanisms:

1\. A standardised presentation of Web content. I can look at an article, and
identify what is the primary content (virtually all of it), what's metadata
(usually the top -- you do a good job but I'd love to see this improved as
well), and where the controls are (standard Pocket bits).

2\. Elimination of online distractions. Sidebars. Ads. Animations. Videos.
Spurious links. Shitty page layout. Shitty font choices. Shitty colour
choices. Shitty CSS choices.

3\. Format optimised for my device and preferences. I love you to tears for
not having to fuck with zoom, font choices, background/foreground colour,
etc., etc., etc., on Every Fucking Webpage. ("Web design isn't the solution,
Web design is the problem.") Huge. Or is that "Hyuuuuge!" now?

4\. My own curation. Anything I've saved to Pocket I've seen at least once.
There's a familiarity in returning to material which makes it more valuable.

5\. Tags. Again, my assigned classifications for material. (And often picks
selected from Pocket's tag suggestions, which are quite good.)

------
ptrptr
[https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-
po...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/)
explanation for this move is very laconic IMO. What are benefits? We already
know majority of user were against even basic integration with pocket.

------
djhworld
I use Instapaper on a daily basis, how does Pocket compare?

~~~
ikurei
These are the most salient differences in my experience with both:

\- Apart from saving the parsed, "readable" version of an article, it can also
save the web as-it-is. This is very useful for those times when the formatting
is important (as it is in articles that include code; you loose syntax-
highlighting with the readable view. Pocket can be set to try and choose the
best view for each article.

\- It does a great job with videos.

\- It uses tags instead of folders.

\- Instapaper has been less reliable for me (specially the android app),
although in fairness I've used it more, so I'd notice it's unreliability more
often.

I'm not that interested in recommendations, but I gotta admit that the few
times I've looked at them, Pocket's recommendations were fairly good.

I've been using Instapaper for around two years now, keeping Pocket as a bag
of less-important links, not-really-reading-material, and very often video. I
was thinking of going back to Pocket as my main read-it-later service,
specially for the first feature I mentioned.

It being Mozilla-owned and some day also OSS will surely be a further
advantage in my mind.

------
gjjrfcbugxbhf
Why would someone use pocket over zotero?

~~~
mcintyre1994
I just searched zotero in the App Store and got nothing, so because every
morning I save stuff from Feedly into Pocket and I have no idea how I'd do
that with zotero.

~~~
gjjrfcbugxbhf
Did you try googling that?

~~~
mcintyre1994
Yea, I found their website :
[https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/) Available for Windows, Mac
and Linux. So no mobile apps at all, Pocket apps are great so that's a good
reason to choose them over Zotero.

------
l3YAVThwTjo1mjl
Will it become firefox exclusive?

~~~
gcp
It's more likely to get fully open sourced, I bet, which would make that
rather hard?

------
kensai
"save to pocket" :D

------
justanton
How does Mozilla earn money?

~~~
zobzu
Search engine deals, and now pocket

------
DanCarvajal
Two apps I no longer use because they became bloated and unfocused, they
deserve each other

------
prirun
They're losing their Yahoo search money in the future and need to make it up
somehow.

------
stonogo
I will never again donate to the Mozilla Foundation.

~~~
callahad
Why's that? This acquisition was carried out by the self-funding Mozilla
Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation is a separate entity.

------
idlewords
Ahahahahaha

------
datatan
So much for my hopes of them removing it from Firefox. Uhg.

~~~
baby
You want them to remove one of the most useful feature of Firefox?

You can remove it easily, but I'd advise you to try using it.

It personally helps me go through interesting news and "pocket" it if I don't
have the time to read it now, or want to keep my time for more important
articles but still think it's an important piece of news.

I have both the desktop Pocket application and the mobile Pocket application.
They download the web view offline, like that I can read articles wherever I
am, when I have some down time.

It's been a huge time saver when it comes to only reading what is important
during the day. Having less tabs. And being able to see what I deemed
important to read after a while.

~~~
yellowapple
The existing bookmark system does pretty much all of that already (with the
sole exception of offline viewing, but Pocket's implementation is reportedly
buggy anyway), and then some. It also syncs across one's devices.

~~~
baby
the offline viewing is the only reason I use Pocket.

------
throwaway206801
Mozilla can spend money on this, but not Thunderbird or XUL-based extensions?

~~~
rhelmer
It's more a question of "won't" rather than "can't".

Why do you think XUL and Thunderbird are good investments vs. things like
Servo or the context graph initiative (which the Pocket team is going to
accelerate according to the blog post)?

Do you think a non-standard framework for making fat native apps and a mail
client built on this framework are going to make Mozilla more relevant?

~~~
rhelmer
The reason I bring up Servo is that parts of it are already starting to land
in Gecko and will ship with Firefox soon - do you think making Servo support
XUL is a good use of anyone's time?

------
vegabook
I have no idea what Pocket is, but as a Firefox stalwart and a person looking
to learn Rust, the fact that Mozilla is actually acquiring stuff gives me
confidence on its financial stability. Very important issue in the decision
making process on future technologies to back.

------
TekMol
Mozilla has the resources to buy companies. But not the resources to make
videos play smoothly. 2017 and Firefox has no hardware accelerated video
playback on Linux.

Every time I read about something Mozilla does, I am reminded of this xkcd
comic from 2013:

[https://xkcd.com/619/](https://xkcd.com/619/)

------
StudyAnimal
Wow, I thought it would be the other way around!

------
justin_vanw
Synergy: One product that nobody uses is now bundled with another one.

------
mi100hael
_> Mozilla is growing, experimenting more, and doubling down on our mission to
keep the internet healthy, as a global public resource that’s open and
accessible to all._

...by buying a crappy, proprietary app?

~~~
gcp
It has a huge user-base, so we can disagree on crappy. And obviously the
latter part is fixable.

Pocket was originally a Firefox add-on.

~~~
rhelmer
The built-in version is too: [https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-
central/source/browser/exten...](https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-
central/source/browser/extensions/pocket)

------
manigandham
This will give them plenty of data for their ad network, which is a nice
strategic move. They always claimed to be privacy conscious so this is perhaps
a nicer way to get interest and behavior information.

~~~
rhelmer
I'm not sure which ad network you mean - there was an effort to serve ads on
the new-tab "tiles" page but that was shut down a little over a year ago:
[https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/12/04/advanci...](https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2015/12/04/advancing-
content/)

