At their core, Read It Later applications, such as Pocket and Instapaper bookmark the things we want to come back to, whenever and wherever we’d like. Of course The Internet Needed a Save Button, but what is actually needed changes over time. In 2007, a list view solution, synchronization on different platforms and offline reading was a great experience transformation of how we managed content on the internet, for a signle-player mode.
But, the core tools we use today for managing content on the Internet — Browse, Search, Share and Save— still can not solve the problem for people and teams/groups who actively searching web content on different topics to work on it later and needs a place where collaboratively manage and effectively consume web content.
It seems like, we moved the problem from ‘I want to save web content to read it later and can’t’ to ‘yes, but I want working on it later experience, individually and collaboratively with others’.
Listening to users won’t tell you what to build. But it will tell you where all the gaps are, and then the team’s creativity can go to work. Pocket left unanswered the gaps(popular feature requests) and made its users and me sad, like this. After it raised Series B, back to 2015, it became clear that their focus has been shifting over time to somewhere else — the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content or essentially on a content recommendation service that serves sponsored pieces to people whom the company determines would be interested in them. While Instapaper do more great things on web content consumption experience and listened to its customers — provide folder support, Highlights, Notes and such, it still left collaboration problem aside, yet.
There are huge difference between consumption of web content as a ‘Read It Later’ and ‘Work on It Later’ experience.
Even Getpocket’s founder, Nate Weiner described a need of Pocket as a ‘Work on It Later’ experience more than ‘Read It later’
Pocket started as, I had a problem and was trying to solve it with a simple tool. I was working at a web design firm in Minneapolis, and still learning programming. So, I was emailing myself links [to JavaScript tutorials and such] all the time. But the emails would just get buried in my inbox and I would never come back to them.
When you find something you want to view later, list view experience seems fine and even while things are a few, unorganized list is ok. When you actually starting to search things on specific topic, open many new tabs, review content and is a need of a place to effectively manage and consume information - to work on it later — even with others, needs something different solution.
Tags are not enough. Whole purpose of categories and tags are to make it easy for users to browse on site. It is too confusing and too cumbersome when contents are blended to each other — things I want to read it later, like late night readings or while traveling via public transport(tech news, psychology, productivity and such) and things I want to work on it later.
I can’t manage things which I want to read it later, and things I want to work on it later, maybe with others.
Collections, Boards, Folders or Groups, call whatever you want, but main List View is actually place for Read it later, because no matter when you will open the app, you will read content in any order(tags helps you to undesrtand the content easily). Foldering is for storing specialized to-read articles , things that you’ve reviewed and want to come back to for a specific project or purpose later on — work on later experience.(Instapaper did it back to 2013, while Pocket didn’t sow the opportunity; Some people said that what makes Instapaper stand out from Pocket is their folder support)
I get out of the ‘One tab’(Steve blank) and find out what others think about my hypothesis about usage of tagging and foldering.
Does not their thoughts about using folders sounds like more on ‘Work On It Later’ experience ?
I also pickted up a lot of thoughts from Twitter — #Getpocket #Instapaper and I found something interesting:
At first I smiled, those reaserch made my hypothesis more right than wrong— Save is not finished yet for different jobs, aspecially for collaboration web consumption and foldering takes cruicial part of this transformation.
On Notes, Highlights — “for the past few months we’ve been working hard on a feature a whole lot of you requested” — while Instapaper introduced notes and highlights back to 2014–15, Getpockt left unanswerd its feature requests even from its users. Is not it easy to guess what is popular requests? highlighting passages and note taking/annotation.
Note-taking and highlighting things on a articles is and it has to be 10× better than the competing solution — copy & paste on somewhere. While this process is so natural as a solo-player experience, lets discuss collaboration opportunities.
“We’re bad at sending stories in a way that gets them read.” — Andrew Courter wrote on its Medium post, How (Not) to Share Articles and discuss interesting issues.
Considering the amount of information you may encounter during one single day, it is easy to overlook something important. However, when you share an article that contains crucial information with your co-workers or your network, you do not want that to happen! So what can you do to ensure everybody on your team, network reads the important knowledge you provide them? Simple: use our Highlight feature! Like the next time you, people from your network, your coworkers visits that same story, your highlights will reappear right where you made them. And the benefit works vise-versa.
Highlight is an attention filter, powered by people and it answers most crucial question while sharing articles — “Why you want me to read it?”.
While Medium introduced Highlight for its network and Highly working hard on how to Highlight the internet, there is a need of same experience privately, to collaborativly ‘Work On It Later’ with our co-workers and network. While writing this sentence, I just imagine if Mozilla will acquire Higly and merge it to Pocket, but I am too sceptical whether or not Getpocket will focus on this problem. InstaPaper already has enough resources and experience on its platform to test work on it later experience.
So, what is a crucial part of Work-on-it later experience?
- Folder support and synchronization,
- collaborative Note/Highlight experience,
- Notification system and Integrations(ex: Slack)
Dear, Pocket and Instapaper
Save is not finished yet. I know there are many people who are waiting to see a great signs that your acquisitions will benefit end-users and will improves the overall product.
Pocket, I am more than 2 year your loyal non-paying customer — on average, more than 1 hour together a day — Thank you! ❤ (2015, 2016). Before Instapaper, you reach me first and I didn’t abandon you, well, yet. I just listend to Adam D’Angelo, co-founder CEO of Qoura on startupschool.org who introduced The “Ring of Fire” concept, which is already happaning to you, and you can turn things around. You created a vacuum and while your focus flying somewhere, while save is not finished yet, be aware from competitors with disruptive technologies which will enter*. Remember why you started.
The next evolution is to share and consume knowledge more freely and effectively — even across organizational boundaries.
How things may look?
Getpocket Work on it later Experience:
As for Instapaper, it has many things already to test work-on-it-later market, even with its Expanded/Condensed view at first.
Looking to find people of alternative points of view and have quality conversations back and forth. I wanted to collect and summarize what I know and think about web content consumption experience. Even interested in to work around it more deeply.
I have to mention one fact that I decided to built something interesting with my friends back to Dec, 2015 during 3 day hackathon: Bundle — Easily share collection of stories and ideas that matters to you and influences others. It is kinda fun that, I decided to build it before Getpocket introduced recommendations. Project committed suicide, but thats kinda start point my interest in web content consumption experience.
*There are some littler players which tried and trying to improve web content consumption experience.
It is interesting to mention Gibbon and Kifi — Both started as a network platform to share web content on specific topic. Growth killed quality, monetization became usertain and they decided to pivot, abandon cunsumer market. While even their landing page and positioning changed, existed product did not answer different segment — knowledge manamgenet, aka work-on-it-later experience for teams — needed to start from scratch. Gibbon merged with knowledge manamgenet enterprise-market foucsed company and Kifi acquared by Google spaces and later project canceled.
Feedly, everyone knows them as an RSS reader, on april 4, 2017 introduced boards, notes, and highlights — Feedly for teams. It is nice to see they are seeng something there, want to expand its business and acquire more customers from side market. But, existed customers do not want new features, new comers have many different features which they don’t need. There are some tough decisions to be made on product and market adoption strategy and it is questionable wheter or not Feedly have enough resources to take this big moves.
Raindrop.io — has nested collections opportunity and work together experience. But based on my research(Instapaper experience) UI/UX is not seems right yet.
Stash.ai — It seems like it wll fill the vacoum which Getpocket created and improve read it later experience.
Refind.com — Discover, save, and read what’s really worth your attention.(Kinda problem what Pocket have to aim)
