Following recent news the Pinterest is launching Promoted video ads, the company has announced that it acquired bookmarking service Instapaper. What Pinterest wants to do with Instapaper and its technology isn’t exactly obvious at this point, but from what we have heard, Instapaper will continue as to exist as usual. For now.
Many of us know Instapaper as a bookmarking service for news. Just like Pocket, you can use it to mark a piece of news to read later. Which is almost what most people use Pinterest for. The only difference is that one does it with text and the other with images. As Brian Donohue, Instapaper’s CEO explained in the acquisition announcement, its core mission has been to allow “users to discover, save and experience interesting web content. In that respect, there is a lot of overlap between Pinterest and Instapaper.”
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Pinterest is probably not interested in this feature, except if it wants to get into news. And it is probably not interested in Instaparser either (a text parser that Instapaper is offering as a product). Instaparser is now sunset and will be deprecated on Nov. 1. So what’s Pinterest going to do with Instapaper? Donohue gives us a big hint.
[quote]Instapaper provides a compelling source for news-based content, and we’re excited to take those learnings to Pinterest’s discovery products. We’ll also be experimenting with using our parsing technology for certain Rich Pin types.[/quote]
By buying Instapaper, Pinterest also gains a lot of information about what people bookmark and how they interact with the content they save. It’s also obvious from the above, that Pinterest wants to be able to serve dynamic content better to use as part of some Rich Pins on the platform. This, as well as keep content relevant and “fresh”. As one Pinterest spokesperson put it,
[quote]Instapaper uses content signals to determine the most popular content and power features like Popular Sort, Instapaper Daily (the top article of the day) and Instapaper Weekly (a weekly digest of the top articles of the week), and this technology could further improve the way we index and recommend fresh and evergreen content on Pinterest.[/quote]
Is this also perhaps part of Pinterest‘s plans with video? Only time will tell…
Featured image credit: TheVerge.com
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