Pocket

We’re happy to announce that updates were released this week for two of our major platforms:

• Read It Later for iOS Version 2.4.3 (Free and Pro)
• Read It Later for Firefox Version 2.1.2

Let’s take a look at each in turn…

Read It Later for iOS Version 2.4.3

(Note: 2.4.3 fixes the black screen / bad 2.4.2 update from yesterday. Thanks to Apple for the quick review!)

This release is mainly around ensuring compatibility with the upcoming release of iOS 5, but we snuck in a few new features (and fixed a bunch of bugs!):

New features:

• View images and embedded video in Article View (Free version)
• Tweet attribution added to Article View (Free version)
• Share menu updated to support Things task management app
• Share menu updated to allow you to report bad article views directly from the app
• Deleting now syncs throughout Read It Later

Fixed:

• iOS5 compatibility updates
• Syncing issues
• Instance where reading position was forgotten
• Additional bug fixes and enhancements

Note: if you are using the Free version of the app, you’ll need to re-download your previously saved articles in order to view the new images and videos in Article View. Going forward, images and videos will be added automatically.

Read It Later Pro
Read It Later Free

Read It Later for Firefox Version 2.1.2

With this release, Read It Later is now compatible with Firefox 7 (the current beta version). We also fixed some other minor bugs including fixing the toolbar button height.

Read It Later for Firefox

In our last blog post, we told you how Read It Later was growing – in fact, last week we welcomed our 6th team member (hi Steve!) After moving into our office last month, we’ve been working hard on a ton of new projects that will begin appearing over the next few weeks and months.

Ultimately, our goal is to revolutionize how people consume web content (articles, videos, and more). Today, we’re excited to announce the first piece. We’ve released an early preview of Read It Later’s new web app to all users. You can begin using the new app immediately to get a look at the direction we’re headed and a number of the new features that are coming to the rest of the platform soon.

Try the preview at: http://getpocket.com/a/

A Brand New Experience

The biggest change you’ll see upon loading the Read It Later preview is a brand new view that comes alive with pictures and excerpts from the articles you’ve saved to your queue. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can create the best experience for consuming all the great content you discover across the web. The new tile view allows your items to stand out and speak for themselves, making it easier and more enjoyable to find the right content when you want it.

There is so much new in this release that we cannot list everything but here are the biggest updates:

Article, Video, and Image Filtering

You can now see all of the videos you have saved in your queue with a single click. Filter to see only articles, videos or images.

Favorites

You can now favorite items that you’ve really enjoyed and would like to keep track of later. Simply click the Favorite star on an item and your content will be saved in a new, dedicated Favorites section for easy reference.

Bulk Edit

Sometimes you’ve just gotta clean up your list. We’ve made it really easy to take action on a bunch of items at once.  Archive, delete, favorite, or tag multiple items with just a few clicks in the new bulk edit mode.

Deleting

Let’s face it, by the time you get to an article, sometimes it may no longer be relevant or interesting. Instead of cluttering your Archive with items you didn’t actually read, you can simply delete them from your list.

So Much More

There really is so much new in this app that you’re just going to have to try it!

Try the preview at: http://getpocket.com/a/

This is just a preview and we’d love to have your feedback!

One night during the summer of 2007, I sat down at my computer and tried to solve a problem. I was constantly trying to move articles and video from work to home but was failing to find an efficient method to do so. I was emailing myself links and keeping tons of tabs open in my browser and it just wasn’t working. Instead, I decided to build an extension for my browser that could keep track of my content.

What I built was called Read It Later.

Turns out, this was a problem that a lot of other people had too. Today, four years later, Read It Later has been used by over 3.5 million people. These people use it to save millions of links every week. They read on every browser and mobile platform and have saved over 100 million articles from the 256 applications that integrate Read It Later.

Read It Later grew not because it was made by a big company or a team with a lot of money or someone with connections in the tech industry. It grew because it was a product people loved and because it had a dedicated team who poured everything they had into building it. Surprisingly enough, even after all those years, that team was just one guy: me.

As you may have noticed, in all of my blog, Twitter, and support posts, I always used the word “I” when referring to the company. I’ve always done this because Read It Later was just me.

Read It Later has been an enormous amount of work for one person. Even though I’ve been lucky to have some very generous individuals lend their time and advice through the years, I’ve been the man behind the curtain building apps and extensions, programming, designing, going to meetings, answering calls, handling support, making decisions, and fighting through every minute of server downtime.

However, even as the main source of Read It Later’s progress, I ultimately became the biggest roadblock.

As the product has grown, it had become increasingly difficult to continue to do all of this on my own. I had a long roadmap and I wasn’t moving as fast as I (or the users) wanted. All the while, bigger companies made offers and others made similar products. Despite all of these attempts, it was incredibly clear that none of these other companies saw what I saw.

If I wanted to take Read It Later where I wanted, I was no longer going to be able to do it on my own.

Even though as a user you may not have seen a ton of new product releases or features in the past few months, I’ve been working non-stop on the biggest upgrade in the history of Read It Later: growing the company.

I’m thrilled to announce today that Read It Later has not only grown from a team of 1 to a team of 5 but has also raised $2.5 million in funding from Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures, Founder Collective, Google Ventures, and a number of other insanely supportive investors.

After many months of putting this together, the team and I will be moving into our first office space in downtown San Francisco next week and will begin rapidly moving through the roadmap I had been working so hard to focus on.

Today is the last post I’ll be writing as “I.”  There is no greater feeling than having others believe in something you created and want to make it their own. I am honored and extraordinarily proud to stand alongside the incredibly smart and talented team of peers and investors that now make up Read It Later.

Read It Later is no longer “me,” but has become “we” and we could not be more excited to show you what we have planned.

- Nate

P.S. Want to be part of the “we?”  We’re looking for #6, 7, and 8 at Read It Later.

This week Read It Later passed a major milestone.  You can now use Read It Later with over 250 applications across every major platform.

Part of Read It Later’s mission is to be accessible no matter where you are, what device your using, or even what application you’re in.  To this end, RIL provides an open API that makes it easy for other developers to push and pull RIL data into their own applications.  Over 4,500 developer projects have been created on the API: some private, 256 now public, and a ton of really cool projects under active development.

If you have not already, pore over Read It Later’s App Directory to find applications that help you get the most out of your Read It Later experience.  There are apps for your computer, phone, tablet, Kindle, and more.

Explore all 250 Apps in the App Directory

Some Popular Categories

News

Some of the most useful applications that support RIL are news readers.  These apps are all fantastic tools for discovering new content and all have the option to save articles directly into your reading list.  Some, like Zite, can even leverage your existing list to learn the types of content you like!

View all News apps

Twitter

Did you know that as you scan through your Twitter stream, most Twitter apps allow you to save the links you come across right to your Read It Later list?

View all Twitter apps

Mobile

Find apps on every platform from iPhone, iPad, Android, WebOS, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Symbian.

Desktop

Outside of apps for every major browser like Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari, you can even find apps for your desktop!

A Lot More…

Explore all 250 Apps in the App Directory

Your mobile reading experience just got better. Zite, the free iPad app that creates a personalized magazine, has become even smarter with its most recent update. Zite now not only includes support for saving articles directly to your Read It Later account, but Zite can also use your existing RIL list to help recommend personalized content.

When you open Zite for the first time, you can sign in using your Read It Later account. Using the items in your RIL list, Zite will then learn about the types of content you are interested in and will create a personalized magazine of content for you to peruse.

Existing Zite users: you can activate this by selecting ‘Connect Other Services…’ from the Customize menu.

Also, you can now save articles from Zite directly to your RIL account. (Just click the RIL icon when on an article!)

Finding great content has now gotten infinitely easier for Read It Later users:  Download Zite for your iPad.

The social news app Flipboard released a new version today that includes Read It Later integration. You can now save content from Flipboard directly to your Read It Later account. To get started, simply select Read It Later as your desired “Read Later” service under Flipboard’s option menu.

Once Read It Later has been selected and you are logged into your account, you can save any content from Flipboard directly to your Read It Later account! Just tap-and-hold on an article’s title or click on the share icon once you are reading an article. Happy reading!

Read It Later Free Now Available For Android

Read It Later, the #1 Paid News app on Android, is now available in a free version.  The new free app provides the same core Read It Later experience and is perfect for light use or as an introduction to new users.

Get the app on the Android Market: Install Read It Later Free

Read It Later

Over 3 million people have used Read it Later to better manage their online reading across every major platform. It has been called “a DVR for the web” by the New York Times, Business Week, Time, TechCrunch and more.

One Reading List, Everywhere You Are

View or add to your reading list from any computer or mobile device. You can save articles from practically anywhere: your computer, browser, phone, mobile device and within over 150 applications that have Read It Later Support. Read It Later even remembers your scroll position in every article so you can start reading on your computer and pick up exactly where you left off on your phone.

Instant Sync (Push syncing, exclusive to the Android app)

When you add a new item to Read It Later, it will instantly download to your Android device.  All wirelessly, seamlessly and without any manual effort on your part.  During your day, simply save articles from any device or app. The next time you grab your phone, all of your content will be waiting for you ready to read, even without an internet connection.

Clean, Beautiful Articles

Read articles in Read It Later’s beautiful Article View.  Content is distilled to show only the words, images, captions, and videos from an article. This gives a clean, consistent reading experience no matter where the article came from. You can adjust the text size, font, alignment and more.

Offline, Read Without Internet

Read It Later downloads all of your articles for offline reading. You can view your articles even when away from an internet connection, which is perfect for reading on the plane, train or your daily commute. Read It Later can download both the complete webpage and the Article View for reading offline.

Get Read It Later Free for Android!

Read It Later Free is now available in the Android Market:  Download Read It Later Free

Go Pro

If you are an existing Read It Later user or want a more powerful experience beyond the free app, go Pro!

Features exclusive to Read It Later Pro include:

• View your entire list (no limits to the number of articles that can be viewed/downloaded)
• Search your list
• Sort your list
• Currently Reading List  (view all open/unfinished articles)
• Rotation lock
• Volume Rocker Scrolling

I have been working hard on a huge new update to the Article View and I’m excited to tell you that it’s finally ready.

Note: Updates to the Article View require no changes or updates on your end.  However if you’d like to update any articles that were saved before today you will need to redownload them.

Multi-page Support

The Article View will now automatically assemble multi-page articles for you!  You no longer have to save each page individually or hunt down a single-page/print view of an article.  In fact, you can even save any page within the set (ex. page 3 of 10) and the new Article View will still grab and combine all of the pages before and after.

A Word on Development

Multi-page support was Read It Later’s longest standing feature request.  The reason it has taken so long to implement was not a lack of importance.  (In fact, I think this is easily one of RIL’s best features now.)  The delay was making sure that it was done right.  If you’ve been here a while you may remember that an early version of RIL’s iOS app actually had multi-page support but it was removed in 2.0 because I was not satisfied with the experience.  I shelved it and decided to wait until I could give it the focus the feature deserved.

I had 3 requirements I had to satisfy:

1. Non-language specific – RIL is a global platform with over two-thirds of its users living outside of the US.  The parser could not simply rely on looking for specific language like ‘Next’ in the page.
2. Non-site specific – There should be no site specific rulesets that have to be constantly added or updated.
3. Be able to save any page – Most of the time when I save a multi-page article its when I’m half-way through it.  I wanted the parser to be able to find all of the pages before and after the page that was saved.

I’m happy to report that after toiling in the bat cave, I’ve finally built a multi-page feature that I’m truly proud of.  I have been testing this for weeks and have yet to find an article that the parser was not able to stitch together.  Go try it out and let me know what you find!

Note: If you try it on an older article and it does not work, be sure to refresh it first. RIL may be serving you the old cached version processed by the old parser.

RTL Support

The new parser has support for RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew.  RTL languages will now be displayed in the proper direction.  The update also provides improved detection of articles written in RTL languages.

Improved Accuracy

In addition to multi-page support, this update brings a significant number of improvements to the parser’s ability to detect article content.  Thank you to all of you who have sent in Article View reports.  They were incredibly useful in improving the parser.

Improved Author Detection

Author and byline detection has been dramatically improved.  I am planning a larger update to improve this even further in the future.

–

Enjoy!

- Nate

Exciting news: It has been a long time coming, but we finally got readitlater.com!

You can already access the homepage directly from the shorter URL.  We are working on our migration plans for the entire site and API but expect to officially make the move to the new, shorter domain name in the very near future.

Begin writing your goodbyes to the painfully long readitlaterlist.com address.  It won’t be wasting our precious keystrokes much longer!

Thank you all for the tremendous response to our Android app so far.  Since our launch last month, Read It Later has remained steady as the #1 paid news app!

Today we are releasing version 1.1.  It brings a ton of enhancements under the hood in addition to a few new features.

We’ve got an exciting roadmap for RIL on Android with a number of big updates lined up for the near future.  Stay tuned!

Get Read It Later for Android

Login Support

You can now access subscriber-based content from Read It Later.  For example, if you are a NYTimes or Wall Street Journal subscriber, you can login to your accounts and RIL will use the accounts when downloading your content for offline reading.

To manage your site accounts and subscriptions, open the new account manager in the options screen.  Then simply select the sites you have accounts for, enter your account information and voilà, you’ll be able to access your content in Read It Later, even offline.  There are no limits to where/how you can save your content.  You can continue to save with the bookmarklet, extensions, and through third-party Twitter or news apps.

Volume Rocker Scrolling

As in many popular Android web browsers, you can now use the volume control to scroll in the Reader view.  Push once to page up or down.  Push and hold to jump to the top or bottom of an article.

You can enable this feature in the advanced settings screen.

What Else is New:

• Ability to edit account (username, password, and email) within the app.
• Improved support for non-English languages/encodings (more improvements coming soon).

Fixed:

• Changed the appearance of the night mode button to be more clear.
• A bug where viewing the Article View of certain pages caused high CPU usage.
• A bug where the scroll position would jump when switching from another app.
• A bug where background syncing was sometimes not occurring automatically.
• A bug where some links would not open properly when clicked on.
• Some cases where the hard search button did not open search.
• Resolved a number of crashes, bugs, and minor issues.