Pouring One Out for Pocket
Well, a little less than two months since Mozilla announced it was happening, Pocket, the venerable read-it-later service, has officially shut down.
I’ve been meaning for the last few days to check when Mozilla was turning out the lights; go figure, it’s today.
I’ve exported all my saves, which turned out to be a list of nearly 15,000 URLs split across two CSV files.
My real-later journey has been long and winding. I’ve traveled from Instapaper to Pocket to Readability to Instapaper to Reeder to Goodlinks to Readwise Reader to Pocket. But when I got a Kobo a few years ago, I settled on Pocket since you can read your saved items on the e-reader. Pocket has also had great integration with the Reeder app.
Although I rarely use the Pocket app or website, I’ve been very happy with its text parsing and reliability. And I’ve appreciated how democratic it is. It seems like it’s been very developer-friendly, available everywhere, and able to be integrated in other apps.
In fact, I had vague plans of trying to build my own read-later app upon Pocket’s infrastructure some day. I guess that won’t be happening now.
To maintain my current read-it-later workflow, my plan is to import my saves into Instapaper, since it has the same integration with Reeder as Pocket did.1 That aspect should be fairly seamless. But my Kobo will go back to being purely for reading books.
You had a good run, Pocket. Rest easy, my friend.
What I should do, though, is try starting over with my reading workflow and give Artemis, the calm web reader, a serious try. I like so much about what it stands for — namely, reading articles on their actual websites, and having a quieter, scaled-back reading queue.↩︎