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Pinterest widened its shopping list with another bookmarking service called Instapaper that focuses on saving articles and offering recommendations based on user’s preferences.
The details of the purchase were not published in the media. However, the acquisition stirred up rumors concerning Pinterest’s strategy.
Instapaper
Instapaper is an app allowing users to save online content such as blog posts, recipes, news stories, which they can store and access at a later time.
The service works a very similar way to Pinterest, by using the same bookmarking feature. The difference is that Pinterest is focused on visual, while Instapaper is more interested in text content.
Pinterest wanted to bookmark articles ever since 2013. The developers modified the pins to provide the app’s users with options such as previews of the stories along with the headline, byline, and links to the actual article.
The power of the two apps may bring users an enhanced experience of newspaper clippings.
Instapaper had made a secret of their number of users, even when it was marked as required information. However, the app developed by Marco Arment managed to acquire a couple of successes after it had been first sold.
Instapaper is said to have rewritten the backend, to have increased the number of mobile and web clients, and to improve search and parsing. Moreover, it introduced features such as text-to-speech, highlights, or speed reading.
The New Acquisition
The company that operates a photo sharing website has almost 500 employees, and it was launched in 2010. It’s focused on discovering and collecting visual items.
Pinterest acquired the new service because of its need to find new content and to make the technology smarter.
Instapaper will remain to work as a separate app. Its parsing queries and its capacity of offering good search results will offer users an ability to discover faster quality content around the internet.
The team behind Pinterest guarantees that the app will not be changed. However, the people working for Instapaper will have to move from the New York City betaworks offices to the Pinterest team situated in San Francisco.
The latest information concerning Pinterest’s article pins is from 2013 when the app is said to have 5 million text content links saved inside its collections. The parsing skills coming from Instapaper will help the Rich Pins to get smarter at discovering content and bookmarking.
Even if it’s very early to tell, the Instapaper acquisition will help Pinterest to upgrade its services.
Image Source: Flickr
