The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016

https://medium.com/@readability/1641cc18e02b#.usur1230j

50 25 10 years ago

I will miss this one. Used it for at least 4 years.

Other than wanting a highlighting feature, I've been completely satisfied with this abandoned product (last update at least 2 years ago?). They nailed it for me, especially with design aesthetics.

And it had the absolute best send-to-Kindle parser: It sent an actual personal document, not a Kindle magazine, and they even managed to include article images most of the time (which other services struggle with).

:'(

basch2• 10 years ago

they had

1) one of the best pool of popular articles in a day - readability.com/topreads 2) best kindle send to 3) best reading mode for a browser

i feel very mildly traumatized losing readability.com/topreads. redef+longform dont quite cover everything topreads did.

for people who dont know what it was - https://web.archive.org/web/20150415110937/https://readabili...

Slackwise• 10 years ago

They nailed it for me, especially with design aesthetics.

#1 reason I stopped using Readability was their "designs".

The web app had constant bugs, especially right after their big redesign and the Android mobile version was terrible. It would pop up a notification every 5 minutes to tell you it's checking for articles, and there was no way to turn that off.

Didn't change for a year, so I dumped them and said "guess this is an abandoned product".

dredmorbius5• 10 years ago

The Android app has been similarly insanely buggy, and seems to want to completely re-download the article database every few uses. That was actually a big part of what pushed me to Pocket.

dredmorbius5• 10 years ago

Sad, but hardly surprising. I would really like to hear the backstory on this.

I'd run across Readability a few years ago and found it useful. There was an update to the application about 2012/2013, which as is typical, offered a few things, but also took away others which had been useful.

And then .... nothing. The Facebook page hasn't been updated since Januarey 23, 2014. The blog is ... offline. Twitter actually seems active, though I'd thought that hadn't been active either.

I really liked the concept, had issues with the execution, loved the bookmarklet (for rendering pages within a browser in "readability view"). But this had obviously been abandoned for a long, long time.

I've been slowly schlepping articles to Pocket. I guess I'll have to speed that up....

Hrm. I find this about the design firm behind Readability joining Facebook, a year ago: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/01/16/design-partners-behind-m...

basch2• 10 years ago

the weird thing is, readability.com/topreads recently had a makeover to make it more responsive.

it really really sucks losing instapaper daily and readability top reads in the same year. imho, readability.com/topreads was one of the best surveys of what was popular in the longformish world on a given day.

nicky0• 10 years ago

When readability started it had an innovative business model: collect monthly from each user, and share out 70% to the owners of the pages viewed.

However, a number of bloggers and content owners objected to this, and made bug fuss about it, and pretty much poisoned the "with it" tech croud on the idea of Readability.

Readability then pivoted to a more conventional read-later app and read-now service. But it never seemed to recover from its original bad press.

dredmorbius5• 10 years ago

I vaguely recall that. Pity, all 'round.

mmmcookies• 10 years ago

I worked on Readability for its launch. I remember they had difficulty monetising it. But more importantly, the firm that built it, Arc90 (now Postlight), was acquired by SFX a few years ago who has no interest in that space. I'm surprised it has stayed up this long.

dredmorbius5• 10 years ago

I suspect it coasted purely on momentum -- hosting fees or such.

The parser/converter has actually stood up amazingly well considering it's seen little or no updating.

billconan• 10 years ago

how sad, I loved readability. I tried to port their javascript code to c++.

davidp670• 10 years ago

If you're looking for a bookmarking alternative BookmarkOS has been awesome so far (https://bookmarkos.com). Also, Instapaper (https://www.instapaper.com/) recently got acquired by pinterest, so it looks like it has a future.

sandstrom• 10 years ago

Being acqui-hired doesn't spell well for its future.

o_____________o• 10 years ago

Advice as a URL: https://getpocket.com/

schmeddie• 10 years ago

Figured this was coming after Readlists closed down a few months ago. Damn I miss them.

avindroth• 10 years ago

For just the readability aspect, Stylish is an excellent alternative (with custom CSS).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...

StanAngeloff• 10 years ago

This was the main service I've used for the past 2+ years to deliver individual articles to my Kindle. It worked great and I would've paid good money to keep it. Instapaper has a similar feature, however it was never quite as good as Readability's.

What are you using to send & read web articles on your Kindle?

dredmorbius5• 10 years ago

As I mentioned earlier, I'm using Pocket (https://getpocket.com), which has worked out pretty well.

Pocket do not have a Readability import tool, but there's a third-party tool their support desk just provided a URL for, caveat emptor, etc., etc.

http://hsablonniere.github.io/readability2pocket/

Among other alternatives, I'll suggest giving https://pinboard.in from @idlewords (Maciej Czeglowski) a look as well. I actually think that might have a few other features I'd want, but am parking for now at Pocket (inertia, too many damned articles, the simplified reader view is really appreciated).

________________________________

Edit: Corrected "in" for "io" as Pinboard's TLD.

welanes3• 10 years ago

I'm working on a bookmarking service right now (literally, open in the other window).

Instant search, highlighting, a UI that encourages 'rediscovery' of articles that are saved but not read ("hey you, here's what you bookmarked 7 days ago") and a reading feature similar to readability. There's space here to build a product that people love and that sticks around.

Parsing web pages is proving tricky in some cases, if anybody has any library suggestions, shout.

tachaeon• 10 years ago

will it be self hostable?

welanes3• 10 years ago

Launching as a service to begin with, however considering people's justified concerns with bookmark services folding I'll look at that.

Key feature will be easy import from every other popular bookmark service. Pull in your data in seconds, see if you like how we treat it, and make a call on switching.

idlewords• 10 years ago

Tweet me (@pinboard) when it's ready and I'll be happy to tell people there's a new bookmarking game in town. I like to advertise new arrivals because it makes me look confident.

mehdix• 10 years ago

Will they just trash their code? It is hardly going to be an asset for them and probably is unmaintained for the last couple of years.

It would be great to see them opening the code to the community.

The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016

Related Stories