History Repeats Itself - Highlighter Edition
Marco Arment is a maverick developer. He was a CTO at Tumblr. He created a “Read It Later” service called Instapaper. It is a neat tool to save an online essay or blog. Instapaper will strip the unnecessary ads, recommendations and will simply store the text and the images. You can read whenever you are free, even offline without any Internet. It was a front runner up even before Safari introducing the nice, “Reading Mode”, in its browser. I was a huge fan of Instapaper. Instead of hoarding many articles in the browser tab, I just used to save it in Instapaper and read it later. At that time, there were a another bunch of tools like Pocket and others came. Many vanished, but Pocket is still around.
Something happened, Instapaper, was acquired by Pinterest. That should be a happy news. Because all the premium features of Instapaper was available for free. Sadly, no improvement happened in the product, even though they are with a behemoth like Pinterest. People were leaving Instapaper in troves and moved to Pocket.
Few years later something nice happened, Instapaper became independent of Pinterest. They didn’t fit in the grand scheme of things and align into the vision of Pinterest. They introduced a paid premium version to make themselves sustainable. I happily became a customer of theirs. I am glad to pay for Instapaper because it is a crucial tool in my workflow. I get a mild satisfaction that they may not run out of business, because there a lot of people like me who will be paying for Instapaper Premium.
Point here: If a tool is free and fully supported by ad-based revenue or subscription based revenue from its users, the tool may be surviving for a long time. Very rarely tools like Wikipedia survive with donor or patron based model.
The same thing is happening now with the highlighting applications. Highly is a simple and helpful tool to highlight the content you are reading online. I read a lot online, if any line or phrase is interesting or worth remembering, I just highlight. It gets synced with ReadWise and sent in a daily mail of randomly selected 10 topics. All was well so far.
But Twitter acquired Highly a few months ago. They shut down the iOS app. They made their premium version of their product as free for all. I am not sure when Twitter will shut them down. I really hope these guys at Highly finds a good business model to run their app.
Hope the history of Instapaper repeats for Highly too.