Mozilla Acquires Pocket

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/

by qdot76367 • 9 years ago

1187 445 9 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

xyos• 9 years ago

what will happen to pocket premium?

chrisabrams2• 9 years ago

It will fund Firefox development :P

dredmorbius17• 9 years ago

Source?

m52go• 9 years ago

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

hgontijo• 9 years ago

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

rebeccaskinner• 9 years ago

I got a year of it through the humble productivity bundle (or something similar) a couple of years ago. It's one of the few things in the bundle that I continued to subscribe to (along with lastpass) after the bundle ran out. It's cheap, and I enjoy the service. I don't really use the premium features so much that their absolutely indispensable, but they are nice. I keep a huge library of stuff in pocket and the unlimited storage space and easier searching is nicer than having to re-google for things.

r3bl3• 9 years ago

I never saw any value to buying a premium. Their free features did the trick, and the only reason I may even consider purchasing a premium for are the ads, which will probably disappear after Mozilla takes it over.

krschultz• 9 years ago

I did. I'm not sure if there is any features of value, but I pay for all the small apps I use so that the developers don't go out of business.

bearcobra• 9 years ago

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.

AaronMT• 9 years ago

This is Mozilla's first acquisition.

ygjb• 9 years ago

The only other example is the hiring of three co-founders of Humanized, https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/15/breaking-mozilla-buying-hu...

callahad5• 9 years ago

Mozilla is actively working to diversify its sources of funding; the greatest step in that was when we switched from a global default of Google search to smaller, regional deals with Yahoo, Google, Yandex, and Baidu toward the end of 2014.

datatan2• 9 years ago

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

gcp5• 9 years ago

You can have hope for a better integration than that odd toolbar button and the silly login page that asks you to make Yet Another Password instead of using the Sync/Mozilla account one.

r3bl3• 9 years ago

Aren't you able to log into Pocket using your Mozilla account for a while now?

mcmahoniel2• 9 years ago

In case you didn't know, you can remove it from the toolbar via "Customize", or completely disable it by toggling `extensions.pocket.enabled` in `about:config`.

That being said, I started using it extensively after being a big fan of Instapaper. The browser integration (especially the easy tagging) has been really helpful in keeping my tab count down.

hendersoon2• 9 years ago

I use a simple bookmarklet for Pocket. This consumes zero resources and works just fine.

https://pastebin.mozilla.org/8980504

epoch1970• 9 years ago

When people say that they want to "remove Pocket from Firefox", they don't mean just hiding a toolbar button or disabling it using about:config.

They don't want it there at all, in any way. They don't want it using any of their computing resources, no matter how minute this usage might be.

They tend to see it as something that should be available as an add-on that's installed on-demand by those who actually want the functionality.

baby6• 9 years ago

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.

yellowapple5• 9 years ago

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.

datatan2• 9 years ago

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

Completely subjective. Also pointless as it could easily just be an addon. It's just bloat however and my own subjective POV is it's useless. I've never once used it, have no desire to use and don't even know anyone who uses it.

So yeah, there ya go

baldfat• 9 years ago

I use pinboard.in I never had an issue with Pocket because I never used it and just uninstalled it.

derefr• 9 years ago

What is the resistance to having it in at this point? Every browser has a cloud-backed page snapshot feature.

yellowapple5• 9 years ago

My own reason for disliking it was that it's a closed-source piece of an otherwise-FOSS browser. Hopefully this acquisition means a change for the better on that front.

Touche• 9 years ago

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.

adamnemecek• 9 years ago

This is Mozilla corporation, which l, while being a subsidy of the foundation, is a corporation regardless.

thomasahle• 9 years ago

Right, I thought pocket was actually one of the Mozilla sponsors, given the default installation in Firefox.

gcp5• 9 years ago

It was stated several times that Mozilla didn't get any money from Pocket for the integration.

smacktoward2• 9 years ago

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.

st3fan3• 9 years ago

First acquisition but not first investment. For example see https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-makes-s...

superdaniel• 9 years ago

Too bad sync kind of sucks... Just yesterday I was looking at a recipe on my desktop and then I opened Firefox on my phone and tried to get at the link without emailing or messaging myself and it only showed sync'd tabs from over a week ago.

shmerl2• 9 years ago

There was a resistance to using Pocket, because it's a closed proprietary service. Now Mozilla plan to open source it, for which they had to buy it first. So it's a good outcome IMHO.

nerdponx• 9 years ago

Now all they need to do is make it self-hostable.

bastawhiz2• 9 years ago

They invested a million or so in Everything.me a few years ago for Firefox OS. I don't think they've actually acquired another company, though, or at least not any company of note.

kennymeyers• 9 years ago

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

dleslie• 9 years ago

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

l3YAVThwTjo1mjl• 9 years ago

Will it become firefox exclusive?

gcp5• 9 years ago

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

mi100hael• 9 years ago

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?

TD-Linux• 9 years ago

... and making it open-source?

gcp5• 9 years ago

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.

rhelmer15• 9 years ago

The built-in version is too: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/exten...

smacktoward2• 9 years ago

On the plus side, now it may still be crappy but at least it won't be proprietary anymore!

rhelmer15• 9 years ago

...by buying a crappy

citation needed

proprietary app?

fixable

wodenokoto• 9 years ago

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.

baby6• 9 years ago

I agree. For example, you can't really see a list of what you pocketed unless you go to their webpage. Or if you want to be able to read them offline, you need to download the Pocket application. I wish all was integrated in Firefox. It's 2017 and a browser needs this and tabs on the side by default.

MikusR• 9 years ago

The old discontinued extension did exactly this. It had oflline, integrated into sidebar and displayed if you already have added link to pocket.

dyukqu• 9 years ago

You can have tabs on the side via an addon. Here: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center

r3bl3• 9 years ago

Couldn't agree with you more, I absolutely love both of the brands and use their products regularly, but the Pocket integration into Firefox itself is something I always considered a bad move from the principles perspective. At least including it now makes much more sense.

toyg3• 9 years ago

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...

usrusr• 9 years ago

Or in a less negative spin, acqui-hire a group of people you already know you enjoy working together with.

I don't think that there would have been that many other suitors for pocket, so depending on how close they were to just closing the price might be extremely low (or are any numbers making the rounds?). Maybe there is not much acqui in the hire, could have been more like a deal between founders and investors, "allow me to take the brand with me to my future employer".

alphapapa3• 9 years ago

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.

bartvk7• 9 years ago

This is far more powerful than just bookmarks. Pocket succeeded in getting clients everywhere, even on eReaders.

philfrasty• 9 years ago

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...

Duhck• 9 years ago

I am in the same spot. I bookmark a TON of stuff and I never visit it again.

I do sync pocket right before a flight but find myself engaging with it rarely.

I find my use of bookmarks akin to liking something on facebook (or even saving it for later, which I never go back to).

splintercell• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

Same here.

baby6• 9 years ago

I Pocket a lot of stuff that I don't read, but in the end, I end up reading more stuff thanks to Pocket anyway.

outworlder• 9 years ago

This is why I created a IFTTT action to add the item to todoist if I have given it a tag ('read', in my case).

This way I can go back and read the articles that I really care about, while still saving low priority stuff that I only go through when I'm bored.

enobrev2• 9 years ago

I see Pocket as the place where I put incredibly interesting things that I will never see again. I absolutely love Pocket and I have So Many interesting things in there. But I never look.

I started putting things in Google Inbox, and I found that I like the reminders to read things - but I don't look at those either. I just keep pushing them back, and eventually, during a less busy week, move them over to Pocket, where I can truly stop reading them.

One day, years from now, I'll read everything I've put into pocket over the years and finally understand the universe.

vertebrate2• 9 years ago

You are not alone, but I just use bookmarks for that. Is using Pocket any different from that, e.g. does it save pages internally so if the original site goes down the page will still be available in Pocket?

TillE• 9 years ago

Neither do I, but it's invaluable when I remember something in that 0.5% and need to search for it.

I use Pinboard for organized reference bookmarks, and Pocket as a dumping ground for anything that seems interesting. Some of it gets moved to Pinboard or deleted, but otherwise I like keeping it there as a record in case my brain decides something from the past is important again.

wiredearp• 9 years ago

All the latest e-readers from Kobo come with Pocket integration (hopefully also going forward) and I can testify that it helps a lot if you get the reading material off the LCD display and off the general internet where I would otherwise also just browse around and bookmark stuff without actually reading anything.

Broken_Hippo2• 9 years ago

My Pocket usage increased significantly if I'm out of the house often. I use very little mobile internet to keep my phone costs down - using pocket offline works out great.

I don't read all of the articles I have on there, of course, but that's OK. It still works for bathroom or on-the-road reading. Admittedly, games get played during toilet visits more often than articles getting read.

stinkytaco• 9 years ago

I did the same thing. Then I bought a kindle and use calibre to download my reading. That's made all the difference. Much more comfortable to read and I can catch up on an article or two before bed or when I've got a few minutes.

dredmorbius17• 9 years ago

First: I'd love to have stats on material indicated within Pocket.

1. Total articles saved. Archived. Rread.

2. Counts by tag.

3. A "times read" count. There are hot articles I hit a lot.

4. Numbering of items on page.

The lack of ANY user-focused stats or reporting on virtually any Web-based tools is ... kind of creepy, actually, given the extent user data is sliced, diced, marinated, and skewered on the provider and advertiser ends.

Back to the matter of what's read: Pocket is effectively my "vetted web". Content I've found and found at least worth a second look. The biggest problem(s) I have presently are that I cannot effectively mine that archive. Pocket's tools for searching, ordering (or unordering -- there's a strong argument for randomly accessing a stratified sample) are a hugely increasing friction point.

m3Lith• 9 years ago

That's me as well. I've used Pocket since it was called Read It Later and probably have opened my saved list only a handful of times.

What I've started using some time ago, though, is Reread.io – it sends you emails containing random articles from your saved list, on specified intervals. I have it set up to send me a couple each week, that way it doesn't feel "forced", and better than having them forever forgotten.

chrisabrams2• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

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

jccalhoun• 9 years ago

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.

shmerl2• 9 years ago

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

apetresc2• 9 years ago

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/

baby6• 9 years ago

It also kind of sucks with javascript when it downloads the page offline. Pages that use Mathjax or something for LaTeX never display correctly so I can enver read them offline :/

tertius5• 9 years ago

See Youtube red.

alainv• 9 years ago

Youtube Red is not available in most of the world:

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

mplewis• 9 years ago

That's a paid service. Youtube-DL is free and open source.

apetresc2• 9 years ago

My conscience is assuaged by the fact that I am already paying for Google Play Music, which would include YouTube Red at no additional cost, if I lived a few miles away on the other side of the Canada-USA border.

And anyway, despite the name, youtube-dl supports a whole lot more than just YouTube.

wirddin2• 9 years ago

This problem got solved when YouTube started allowing offline videos. Idk if it is available in your country, but in India you don't need to be a paying customer to save offline videos.

pcnix• 9 years ago

That's only on mobile afaik. How do you deal with it on the desktop?

m-p-3• 9 years ago

India usually get those offline features much more faster than other countries for some reason.

I wish we had these options in Canada, because mobile bandwidth is stupidly expensive over here.

dunham• 9 years ago

You could script this with a bookmarking service like pinboard.in (anything with an API) and a cron job.

dredmorbius17• 9 years ago

If you're on Android, I've found a set of tricks which work for this pretty well.

Ingredients:

1. Termux App.

2. Termux API App.

3. Termux CLI utilities. apt install termux-api

4. Python: apt install python

5. youtube-dl: pip install youtube-dl

6. VLC App. Install from app store.

7. A set of shell functions for clipboard and application access:

    alias xc='termux-clipboard-set'
    alias xp='termux-clipboard-get'
    open () 
    { 
        termux-share "$@"
    }

I'll generally download videos to the Download folder, which I've symlinked from the Termux home directory:

   lrwxrwxrwx 1 u0_a204 u0_a204 29 Apr 26  2016 Download -> /storage/emulated/0/Download/

Oh, and how did I get those functions and aliases?

    (alias | egrep x[cp]; typeset -f open) | sed s/^/ / | xc

(Pre-formatted for HN's code block.)

With all of that, you can download and play, in one swell foop, a video (assuming you know the output format you prefer -- something you can set as a youtube-dl preference):

    open $( youtube-dl -f 18  "$(xp)" | awk -F':' '/Destination/ {print $2}' )

Or you can fetcha whole slew of content and queue it up on VLC.

I'd still prefer to be able to use a commandline audio player with controls rather than the GUI client. There's a very simple "play-audio" command, but it has no controls -- <ctrl>-C to end is about it, even backgrounding doesn't actually stop playback.

I've messed with the sox "play" command, but it doesn't have an assigned audio device, and I've been unable to convince it that such a thing exists (see StackExchange posts regarding Android for similar issues/discussions).

bartvk7• 9 years ago

Seconding this for macOS. If you haven't installed Homebrew, do so: https://brew.sh/

Then install youtube-dl as follows:

  $ brew install youtube-dl

And download videos as follows:

  $ youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"

ikurei2• 9 years ago

I've played a bit with terminals on Android, but I only had real success using ssh. This seems very convenient, I'll play around with termux, thanks!

BTW, I'm unable to access /storage/emulated/0, it seems Termux doesnt have permission (and the app doesnt list it in its permissions). Is your phone rooted?

Aissen• 9 years ago

There are many apps that do that. A Pocket competitor, Spool, used to that. It was then acqui-hired by Facebook and shutdown. At least they had the decency of sending us our data by email.

_23sd• 9 years ago

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.

Scea91• 9 years ago

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?

StudyAnimal• 9 years ago

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

grappler• 9 years ago

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.

chrido• 9 years ago

I have similar concerns. I really used Pocket a lot. Two times I got an e-mail at the end of the year that I'm in the top 1% of their users. That was nice!

I want distraction free reading which means no social recommendations, sharing and other stuff. Things I would really like is pdf support, x days of reading left, auto scrolling and detailed statistics about my reading. Also cool would be some garbage collection, e.g., news articles are useless to read in 2 weeks but a blog post may be still useful in a few years.

ttam2• 9 years ago

Not only they removed that feature, but they also removed a bunch of other automatic-categories that I used to love (quick reads!)

And, as I've described in a blog post I did about Pocket, the recommendation system they created fails in one huge aspect: it is recommending me things that I've seen elsewhere but just decided not to pocket...

dredmorbius17• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

+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

stroebjo• 9 years ago

I also was/am a frequent Pocket user. But the removal of features (also pointed out by others here) and on the other hand the addition of the recommendation/feed thingy left me wondering where Pocket was headed.

Pocket for me was my archive of things for which I would love to have a great diversity of searching, clustering and organising tools. The addition of recommendation of things I may like is nice, but not a core feature for me - my content is.

I also tried Wallabag [0] which looks promising but hasn't the ecosystem around it yet. So I'm exited to see where this open sourcing of Pocket will lead us. ;-)

[0] https://wallabag.org/en

bravura• 9 years ago

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.

dredmorbius17• 9 years ago

Incognito mode.

Or Archive.is

anexprogrammer• 9 years ago

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

Manishearth• 9 years ago

I could be wrong here, but the thunderbird thing is basically that it was way too much work for little gain -- the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs.

I'm also not sure of this, but that vision thing you link to is focused on the goals of the Foundation proper (excluding MoCo), which is not all of Mozilla, and many of the decisions fall out of that scope.

M_-3• 9 years ago

the way Thunderbird is designed was that it was a kind-of-fork of Firefox, and too many resources were being wasted just keeping the "fork" up to date from changes to internal Firefox APIs.

No. Thunderbird was built against something that the Mozilla foundation used to tout as the future of building software in general: XUL. And there also was a XULRunner which was to Gecko/Firefox what Electron is to Blink/Chrome: a way to develop native apps using the browser engine as a UI toolkit. The difference with electron is that it was built with more native-apps facilities, like spawning up Wizard dialogs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tu... All written in their XML.

It wasn't developed specifically for Thunderbird. Firefox is also built on top of the same technologies. XULRunner versions were released concurrently with new Firefox versions.

The reason why Thunderbird is a dead is because XUL is dead, or rather, will die soon. They are rewriting everything related to UI in Firefox and also terminating the traditional addon API which.. required XUL, in favor of Chrome's addon API.

Thunderbird is not the only notable app written in XUL beside Firefox. There's also Miro, Songbird, Google's adwords editor ( https://support.google.com/adwords/editor/answer/106323?hl=e... ) and many others.

Most software written in XUL has either been abandoned or going to die, anyway.

rhelmer15• 9 years ago

Aside from technical issues, native mail clients are shrinking in use over time, not growing.

It does not seem like the right place to invest to continue having relevance in the marketplace.

zobzu5• 9 years ago

Thunderbird doesn't make money. Pocket makes money.

That Mozilla is a Corp owned by a not-for-profit isn't the real thing anymore (ie not what people may believe, not that they have any obligation beside following the rule of law) - it just frees the Corp from having to report to random share holders - instead, the Corp and the Org self-select a Board of directors that they report to.

At the end of the day, it's otherwise now similar to many corporations.

omouse2• 9 years ago

You can see that just by looking at their job postings. The experimental ads team was hiring and then stopped and then the team was absorbed into other teams. Now they have more postings for project managers. They're basically introducing more hierarchy and traditional corp. stuff from the sounds of it.

RyanZAG• 9 years ago

Thunderbird doesn't make money. Pocket makes money.

That's not the case anymore with this merger though, right? Pocket will now cease to make actual money.

cocktailpeanuts2• 9 years ago

Do you have a source? Revenue and profit are completely different things, and I am curious if Pocket was making any profit. Otherwise it's losing money.

rhelmer15• 9 years ago

Mozilla needs products that are relevant in the marketplace, to exist. Revenue is part but not all of this.

I don't think Mozilla can make meaningful impact in a world where it doesn't make products that internet users want to use. It would be a largely toothless advocacy organization at that point.

yuhong2• 9 years ago

I really wish there was an easier way to do this, ideally something like a corporation with no shareholders.

ffjffsfr• 9 years ago

how does pocket make money? they do have pocket premium: https://getpocket.com/premium?ep=2 but I never saw them advertising it and never thought about using it and I'm using pocket heavily past several months. Is "pocket premium" their main source of income? Is it bringing real dollars?

beachy• 9 years ago

Pocket makes money.

Just pocket money though.

ksec• 9 years ago

Just a question on top of my head, could Mozilla make a SaaS, like a email services ( example only ), and have those money go into continuing develop Firefox.

And as a non-profit entity, could they retain some profit they have as investment or cash somewhere. In case some day they run into negatives they could use those as reserves?

But at the end of the day, Mozilla need some very serious management restructuring, starting from the very top end. Having been a Netscape user from over two decade ago, I finally left Firefox. And if you follow their decision, mailing list etc, you can feel how bureaucratic they are. Slow response to market changes, completely lack of ( actionable )vision, often having completely unrealistic target. Extreme inefficiency in development of its product. And these aren't my thoughts or comment only, their are many ex mozillian employees who felt the same. We all thought Mozilla should have been a great company achieving far then then they are today.

BinaryIdiot2• 9 years ago

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.

hubert123• 9 years ago

I was recently looking for desktop email clients and there is literally not a single free alternative? Cant be that awful if it's the only one.

dboreham• 9 years ago

Slow? Hmm...are you sure it isn't your server that's slow?

aluhut2• 9 years ago

Every single time anyone complains about Thunderbird I ask myself wtf they are doing with this mail client.

pfg• 9 years ago

The only thing that forces me to keep Thunderbird around are mailing lists. I haven't found anything else that doesn't break quoting or messes with word/line wrapping in plaintext mails. To be fair, even Thunderbird requires quite a bit of about:config tuning to get it to behave sanely.

I suppose I'll have to learn to live with mutt eventually.

jackmoore• 9 years ago

Totally unrelated, but I keep falling for this same cycle of disappointment based on testimonials for The Simpsons.

gweinberg• 9 years ago

So did you find a better client?

open-source-ux• 9 years ago

Have you tried Sylpheed? It's a lightweight, open source email client for Windows and Mac OS. I am using the Windows version. The installer is a mere 8mb in file size. I switched from Thunderbird to Sylpheed and am very happy with it so far.

http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

jacquesm3• 9 years ago

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.

Arizhel• 9 years ago

The problem is that there aren't exactly a lot of other great FOSS standalone email applications these days. Everything's been neglected because of webmail, and corporations' dogged insistence on Outlook.

So if you think Thunderbird should be killed, what do you suggest as a replacement? It needs to be free, and run on Windows for my company to use it.

pix64• 9 years ago

Thunderbird is awful, but I have yet to find anything better.

jimporter• 9 years ago

(Context: I'm a submodule owner on Thunderbird, but haven't had much time to work on it lately. It should go without saying, but the comments below are my own view on the matter and shouldn't be considered authoritative.)

tl;dr: I think Mozilla has actually treated Thunderbird fairly well (but not quite as well as I'd like).

Thunderbird has been difficult for Mozilla to support for a while. In many ways, Thunderbird is only in as good a spot as it is because of people at Mozilla who still care about Thunderbird. There are lots of Gecko features that are used by Firefox and Thunderbird, and often, Gecko devs who make breaking changes to something Thunderbird uses will - if not fix the bug - at least alert the Thunderbird team of the breakage and point them in the right direction to fix it. They're also willing to support (some) stuff that only benefits Thunderbird, especially in the text editor. This can be hard for both teams though, like when Mozilla made huge changes to the Firefox build system; since Thunderbird imports the entire Firefox source tree, Thunderbird had to keep up or be unable to build.

As you can imagine, these difficulties will only be magnified by the (slow) move away from XUL. Worse, Thunderbird's codebase is pretty crufty and full of decisions that last seemed good over a decade ago (e.g. libmime's decision to create its own C-based object system instead of using C++ like the rest of Gecko[1]). It would take a lot of work to make the codebase not suck, and I'm not sure Thunderbird has ever had enough paid staff to do that in a reasonable timeframe. These architectural issues are the reason that message tabs in Thunderbird aren't actually multiplexed: every time you open a message tab, it actually just rearranges the elements from the single instance of the 3-pane layout to make it look right. (That's why scroll position in message tabs isn't preserved when you switch tabs.)

Thunderbird has also has significant difficulties finding a way to make money. Those who remember the Mozilla Messaging days (and the subsequent merge back into MoCo) might recall how that's when the team pushed for features like "Get a New Mail Account" (which has partnered mail providers who could sell users a fancy email address), "FileLink" (which has partners providing file hosting), and even a planned effort to do like Firefox and make money from search referrals (this fell through for some fairly strange partnership issues that I'm not sure I can talk about).

However, despite their general desire to discontinue financial support for Thunderbird, Mozilla (the Foundation, I believe) has opened up donations specifically for Thunderbird[2] which, as I understand it, gave the Thunderbird Council the ability to hire the first paid engineer on Thunderbird in several years[3]. In addition, Mozilla has worked to help Thunderbird find a new long-term home and has provided infrastructure support when they really don't need to do either.

While I think Mozilla should place a greater focus on email, I'm not sure Thunderbird is the best way to go about that, especially as Mozilla moves away from XUL. With the rise of Electron/Positron, something like glodastrophe[4] (based on the ill-fated Firefox OS email app) might have a better long-term outlook. However, trying to replicate all (or even most) of Thunderbird's features in a new application would be a huge effort and it's unclear whether the app would be popular enough to make all that effort worthwhile; I expect Mozilla would want to feel confident that they could use such an app to influence email/messaging standards.

I don't know what's going to happen in the long run, but as a Mozilla employee who started out working on Thunderbird, I still have a special place in my heart for it. I hope that one day Mozilla will be willing to revisit email, but it might take a while.

[1] https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/mime/sr... [2] https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ [3] https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2016-December... [4] https://github.com/asutherland/glodastrophe

jlgaddis2• 9 years ago

Thanks for taking the time to provide your insight and especially for the link so that I can contribute directly towards continued Thunderbird development!

grinich• 9 years ago

We're getting closer and closer with Nylas Mail, although still have a long way to go!

https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail'

(I work at Nylas)

hashhar• 9 years ago

Gotta start contributing to TB now. Thanks for all the insight.

notatoad2• 9 years ago

The people that complain about mozilla stopping development on thunderbird seem to be the same people that complain about things like firefox moving to WebExtensions, and Firefox changing their UI, and Firefox integrating Pocket.

I don't understand why people are disappointed that Mozilla has stopped actively developing thunderbird - it means it's not going to change. There is an email client that you like, as is, and want to keep using, and you're annoyed because mozilla has promised not to change it?

strictnein• 9 years ago

Does the lack of changes include no security updates? Then yes, one should be annoyed and Thunderbird usage should be discontinued.

hkmurakami6• 9 years ago

Well, at some point OS compatibility will break, no?

nisa• 9 years ago

Maybe it's something that is of value to a lot of users and a non-profit (http://www.computerworld.com/article/3011418/web-browsers/mo...) might help move that important software in the future. Like a competitive open-source browser, a competitive mail client is a good thing. Not everyone want to use the cloud.

flukus7• 9 years ago

Spoken like a manager.

Something is either being actively developed or it's dieing, there is no in between with software, there is no finished state.

bad_user3• 9 years ago

Thunderbird is still under active development, I'm one of their users, being the best email client for the desktop. Unfortunately Thunderbird is also a dead end, being incompatible with Firefox's direction.

Yes, XUL is dead and Firefox is evolving into a Chrome substitute and while people have serious concerns about it, fact of the matter is that Chrome was designed for web apps and almost 9 years after its release Chrome is still the best browser available for web apps. Not sure how many people here remember Chrome's original goals, beautifully illustrated by their comic book announcement, but here's a refresher and try to count the problems that Firefox still has in 2017: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

In other words, Firefox is dying because users have been trained to expect security, stability, an interface free of crappy toolbars and extensions you can't uninstall, not to mention running long lived web apps. And while people on this forum will cry out for Vimperator or other poweruser extensions that 99.9% of the world have never heard about, it's undeniable that without evasive action Firefox will become a footnote in only a couple of years.

I'm also a Firefox user and I understand their move away from Thunderbird. For work I use Gmail, personal email is Fastmail, both have really good web interfaces. And while I try using email clients like Thunderbird, the web interfaces are simply good enough and always there. These are web apps btw and guess which browser is best for web apps? It's not Firefox ;-)

And for all I care Mozilla can kill every project they have, if that means Firefox continues to improve. Because it's still the only browser that cares about my freedoms.

jeena• 9 years ago

But gmail and fastmail don't work offline.

jwr• 9 years ago

As a data point, my webapp (PartsBox.io) works best/fastest in Safari, Chrome is second, Firefox a distant and slow third. So, I'd take issue with the statement that "Chrome is the best browser available for web apps", at least on MacOS, and at least for some web apps (I know WebGL apps work better in Chrome).

FatalBaboon• 9 years ago

I cannot understand the need for a thing like Pocket. Much less why Mozilla prefers to keep it close, and even less for money.

I mean, what is wrong with bookmarks and sharing links? Firefox can even send tabs to other computers I got linked via ff sync.

Iterate on a bad idea, give it a social spin, and voilà! You have a sellable startup. Except you should not buy that.

moberemk• 9 years ago

Two big things: 1) it's a lot faster to send to Pocket with the button > mark as read than managing bookmarks IMO but the real killer feature for me is 2) the offline saving of articles. Pocket is killer when I'm commuting or without Wi-Fi because it means I can keep reading things without worrying about finding a hotspot or wasting my (very limited) data.

dredmorbius17• 9 years ago

Bookmarks-management sucks.

Pocket provides multi-platform access. And multi-browser access -- doesn't matter if I'm on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE, whatevs, I can pull up Pocket.

Pocket strips all of today's utterly fucked, utterly useless, utterly counterproductive Web design. I cannot emphasize too much: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem.

Offline reading. Pocket articles (via app) can be read when disconnected.

Tags. You can create, and cross-reference, tags between articles.

Scale. I've got ~3k - 4k articles on Pocket. Possibly more. (I'll get to that.) They're related to ongoing research, and the ability to find, classify, and relocate large amounts of material is useful.

Whilst Pocket doesn't have a ratings or workflow-related management, I've somewhat created these. A set of tags that relates to quality (rated 0 - 5, low to high, where 0 indicates negative information, 5 indicates a foundational document -- most content is a 2 or 3, and that's rating high. Books and scientific papers generally earn a '4': definitive or clarifying, though generally not foundational.

For workflow, I'm largely working with "readme" (a reminder to go back and read closely), and a set of tags related to specific writing projects. I need to come up with a more useful system.

Pocket also ... sort of and/or sometimes ... allows for full-text search within documents. This may have been a promotional-only feature.

Given that the Web as a whole is approaching uselessness under scope of search, the ability to look through a set of documents I've already at least partially vetted is tremendously useful.

There's a whole slew of things Pocket doesn't do, which I'll address in a top-level comment. I've shared these with the firm, though I've seen little or no progress on any of them in ages.

bartvk7• 9 years ago

I'm a very heavy Pocket user. Here's how I use it. When I browse the web and see something I'd like to read, I hit the Pocket button in Firefox.

When I get home, I take out my Kobo eReader, which has Pocket built-in. It's very nice to read articles on an eInk display, without the distractions of an iPad or a computer.

sametmax• 9 years ago

They try to stay independent. They try to manage their resources. So they can still exist to be Mozilla in the future.

It's HARD.

Don't blame them from not being the perfect champion we used to idealize. They are doing everything they can.

cgag• 9 years ago

I was pretty shocked when I learned they had more than 1000 employees.

aarontyree• 9 years ago

Ive thought the same thing. This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if they...how do you say this nicely...I wonder if they are holding on to what they were? In their approach I mean. Like they think they are still fighting with Google? So they make decisions trying to get back to that "leader position" rather than really focusing on who and what they are...which is an awesome, creative, international open-source community with great ideas...that can out maneuver any large corporation because they are smaller and faster. And cooler. Then again, maybe this rebranding is evidence of exactly that realization.

frik• 9 years ago

It would be great to have a new modern open source email app on iOS, Android and desktop OS. I want a GMail app clone (conversation view), but open source (= doesn't phone home to the creator) that works with IMAP.

Vivaldi browser (unofficial Opera successor) is working on an HTML5 powered email app, though will it be open source?

On Android there is open source K9Mail app but it's pretty old fashion, no conversation view.

I envision a new lean Mozilla browser (like Firefox was to Mozilla Suite back then) based on Rust powered Servo-HTML-engine and a HTML based UI. Additionally an email app addon would fit in my vision.

0xTJ• 9 years ago

If Thunderbird is going to stop being developed, what should I use instead? I like having the add-ons, and use the Calendar with Office 365 Enterprise stuff, and Google Calendar.

vegabook• 9 years ago

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.

hkmurakami6• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

kensai• 9 years ago

"save to pocket" :D

niftich2• 9 years ago

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

omouse2• 9 years ago

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.

nnethercote• 9 years ago

Pocket will be open sourced.

Esau2• 9 years ago

"If it's released under and open source license, then I'll be glad to have it integrated."

Not me. I don't want a bloated Firefox; even if the bloat is well intentioned and fully open sourced.

rhelmer15• 9 years ago

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.

st3fan3• 9 years ago

"large segments of the userbase spoke out with scathing criticism"

Actually .. no. It was a very vocal minority.

niftich2• 9 years ago

You're right, I misspoke; I meant to say several audiences out of a larger pie of distinct cohorts; instead of using wording that implied a large absolute amount of people.

In the past, I've written about [1][2] my views of Mozilla's audiences, and soon after, Mozilla's own internal audiences [3] were brought to my attention. Several of their 'user types' are either noted as averse to change or loss of control.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425956 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161 [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/08/firefox-user-types-in-no...

throwaway206801• 9 years ago

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

Traubenfuchs• 9 years ago

It seems we have have been taken to a bizzaro parallel earth where people enjoy built it bloat that should be an addon in their formerly highly customizeable browser.

rhelmer15• 9 years ago

The Pocket integration in Firefox is very simple and is in fact a built-in add-on.

I think it's a failure of imagination to assume that this is going to be the extent of what Pocket will be able to contribute... they have a lot of users and popular mobile apps for instance which is useful on its own.

As the blog post points out, the hope is that Pocket will accelerate the context graph initiative.

So, I disagree that it's about "bloat" or customization. In any case, the Pocket add-on is like ~700k and it doesn't do anything if you take it off the toolbar...

rhelmer15• 9 years ago

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?

rhelmer15• 9 years ago

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?

justanton• 9 years ago

How does Mozilla earn money?

zobzu5• 9 years ago

Search engine deals, and now pocket

SwellJoe• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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.

padraic7a• 9 years ago

I love this feature. My only concern was being tied into Pocket and wondering what might happen to the company. I imagine that being acquired by Mozilla makes that future a bit more secure.

forevercrashing• 9 years ago

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.

Broken_Hippo2• 9 years ago

It isn't all that obvious how the offline function works - which is a shame. I've been caught without offline availability for some articles I saved.

The main thing with the work-around is that you need to start Pocket on your phone while you have a data connection so that the articles are on the phone. There may be an option to automatically download the articles, but I've never found it. After the one-time data connection, it comes up offline.

This is the case when I save from the computer and view them on my phone (or different device, I guess, but I've not checked a different computer). Your luck may vary.

greyman2• 9 years ago

The main thing with the work-around is that you need to start Pocket on your phone while you have a data connection so that the articles are on the phone.

Hmm, I always found this to be obvious, and not a work-around. How else would they entered the phone?

manigandham3• 9 years ago

Turn on "Instant Sync" and new additions will be added to your app asap.

Also check your download settings. If set to "download only on wifi" then the app won't download if you're on mobile networks. You can also set the "refresh when opened" option to sync everything when the app is first loaded.

greyman2• 9 years ago

Allegedly, you can read things offline, but that feature never works for me.

Strange, because that is the main use case I use in Pocket. I save article there, and it stores it for offline reading, striping all formatting. It isn't a bookmark manager, it stores stuff and doesn't need internet to read it.

joatmon-snoo• 9 years ago

My experience has been GP's: Pocket will claim to save something, but the moment I go offline, it craps out and tells me I need a connection to read the content I've saved.

This is much more common on larger PDFs, but I've had it happen on so many sites that there was a point when I literally resorted to PDF'ing the pages I wanted to save - which is a damn shame, because Pocket's reader view really does do a good job.

DanCarvajal• 9 years ago

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

cpeterso2• 9 years ago

The Firefox bug to open source Pocket: https://bugzil.la/open-pocket

zyngaro• 9 years ago

"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.

hkmurakami6• 9 years ago

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)

dochtman• 9 years ago

I'll keep saying that Mozilla should acquire Fastmail.

Now that would be a strategic acquisition.

morganvachon• 9 years ago

Please, no. I think part of the reason Fastmail has been able to focus on the user experience is because they are independent. I don't want them acquired, disbanded, and dumped. It's the best paid service I've ever used.

gkoberger• 9 years ago

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/

toxican• 9 years ago

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.

AJRF• 9 years ago

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.

justin_vanw• 9 years ago

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

wirddin2• 9 years ago

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

phs• 9 years ago

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!

Roritharr• 9 years ago

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.

Vinnl• 9 years ago

Mozilla open sources everything, and has an open Internet as its mission? I'd trust them to do that with Pocket far more than Facebook with... Facebook.

JustSomeNobody2• 9 years ago

I don't understand your point. Are you upset they bought Pocket?

ajasmin• 9 years ago

Mozilla's donation page says: We are proudly non-profit, non-corporate.

I don't know the ins and out of Mozilla dual identity as a foundation/corporation. But it'd be unsettling to learn that part of your donations to an open-source project is financing a corporate acquisition.

callahad5• 9 years ago

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.

hkmurakami6• 9 years ago

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)

bttf5• 9 years ago

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

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.

threatofrain• 9 years ago

I'd be curious to see an organization scheme other than just tags, as I suspect that it leads to difficult to trim (potentially always climbing up) bloat and cognitive load.

bttf5• 9 years ago

interesting point. tags have been a feature we have not added yet partly because they seem slightly superfluous. the user is able to search across titles, descriptions, URLs, and can curate links with lists. not sure if tags can provide any extra value

bosie• 9 years ago

I signed up and tried to use it but I don't even understand how to add links. The search bar hangs itself (chrome 56) and there seems no way to manually add a link? Am i missing something?

bttf5• 9 years ago

bosie, so far there aren't any guides/helpful messaging or placeholders, so my apologies it's not clear.

the functionality as it stands is, pasting a link and hitting ENTER will add the link.

it needs to be pre-pended with http in order for it to add a link, otherwise it will perform a search.

this will be changed to add a link (http prefixed or not) in any case when there are no search results

supercoder• 9 years ago

Read it later apps are dead. Why do you think Pocket just got absorbed by Mozilla ?

ycombinete• 9 years ago

What would you say killed them?

Better optimisation for mobile viewing has given me less use for Pocket, but I still use it a lot, so I'm interested in your opinion here.

UnfalseDesign2• 9 years ago

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.

bttf5• 9 years ago

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

djhworld• 9 years ago

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

yla92• 9 years ago

Nowadays, I add an article to both Instapaper and Pocket. I used to use Pocket a lot but sticking on Instapaper more.

Things I love about Pocket are

- Curated (and from other people I followed) "recommendations",

- tags "Best Of", "Quick Reads".

- beautiful android app

Instapaper has less features than Pocket but I find that

- Instapaper article parser is better,

- UI is cleaner, highlights ( I love these!),

- ability to switch style (type faces, article background)

- speed read

- they also have "Browse" (something similar to Pocket's recommendation?) but in Android app, it's a bit hidden in the drawer menu so I don't use it often.

bartvk7• 9 years ago

Pocket has clients on more exotic platforms, such as the Kobo eReaders.

ikurei2• 9 years ago

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.

hitlin37• 9 years ago

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

dewiz• 9 years ago

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

stonogo• 9 years ago

I will never again donate to the Mozilla Foundation.

callahad5• 9 years ago

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

gjjrfcbugxbhf2• 9 years ago

Why would someone use pocket over zotero?

lllllll• 9 years ago

In my case, because it syncs with my Kobo Aura HD ebook reader. That way I can read "my internet" offline :)

mcintyre19943• 9 years ago

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.

gjjrfcbugxbhf2• 9 years ago

Did you try googling that?

dredmorbius17• 9 years ago

Fair question, and one I'm asking myself increasingly, though:

1. Zotero doesn't have a full-service (or any?) Android app. Which is my primary reading platform. So it's simply not an option.

2. More straightforward onramp. It's pretty easy to figure out what the fuck to do with Pocket, though after a bit, it gets utterly unusable with scale (I've got ~3-4k articles, possibly more, the fact that I can't even extract a !@#$%^&() count is a major PITA, and referencing them Simply Doesn't Work.

3. Simplified and uniform presentation. Web design isn't the solution. Web design is the problem. I prefer Pocket's styling to ANYTHING* any website can throw at me, with exceptions I can count on the fingers of one hand. Most of which I've made myself.

Frankly, I'm utterly frustrated with use of the Web as a research and archival tool, and none of the options I've seen yet are satisfactory.

gnicholas• 9 years ago

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.

dredmorbius17• 9 years ago

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.

mark_l_watson• 9 years ago

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.

manigandham3• 9 years ago

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.

manigandham3• 9 years ago

Interesting that people think Mozilla either isn't or is against being an ad network... every single attempt to do adblocking/protection ends up being an ad network eventually (if there's a corporation behind it).

rhelmer15• 9 years ago

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...

no_wizard4• 9 years ago

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.

ptrptr• 9 years ago

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

idlewords• 9 years ago

Ahahahahaha

rocky1138• 9 years ago

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...

adultSwim• 9 years ago

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.

ttam2• 9 years ago

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

How can I apply?

hkmurakami6• 9 years ago

Well there's a Mozilla employee posting in this discussion thread, so you might start by reaching out to him. He'll likely have some suggestions.

callahad5• 9 years ago

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/.

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). 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...). 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• 9 years ago

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.

TekMol• 9 years ago

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/

1wheel• 9 years ago

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.

codeisawesome• 9 years ago

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

prirun• 9 years ago

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

bharani_m• 9 years ago

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

dredmorbius17• 9 years ago

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_...

The Reference Management Problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/50o1jv/the_ref...

And some general feedback (wrapped around some specific feedback) to Pocket: 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.)

leopld• 9 years ago

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

nkkollaw• 9 years ago

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.

jslakro• 9 years ago

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

KarlFreeman• 9 years ago

It's fairly early stage but I've been actively building an alternative to Pocket called Filltray (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...) 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 :)!

vivekd• 9 years ago

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.

SZJX• 9 years ago

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.

Mozilla Acquires Pocket

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