Michal Ždanský It's been two years since the service and iOS app Read It Later changed its name to Pocket and switched to a completely new operating model. The initial strategy of a paid and limited free version has become one free app for iOS, Mac and Android, and the company behind Pocket has reduced its revenue from users to zero in order to go down the path of seeking investors instead. It has raised $7,5 million from Google Ventures alone. This model was in a way disturbing for users (currently 12 million) who were afraid and the future of their favorite service for saving articles for reading later.
This week, Pocket revealed what path it will take next. It will offer new premium features via subscription, similar to Evernote, among others partner Pocket, or competitor Instapaper. The subscription costs five dollars per month or fifty dollars per year (100 and 1000 crowns, respectively) and offers the option of a personal archive, full-text search and automatic labeling of stored articles.
The personal archive is supposed to be the biggest attraction of the subscription and, according to the creators, also a frequently requested function. Pocket works on the basis of storing URLs. While articles are downloaded to the app, all content is saved for offline reading, however, once the article is archived, the cache is cleared and only the saved address remains. But the original links are not always preserved. The page may cease to exist or the URL may change, and it is no longer possible for users to get back to the article from Pocket. This is precisely what the archive library, which turns a service for reading later into a service for storing forever, is supposed to solve. Subscribers are therefore sure that they can access their saved articles even after archiving.
Full-text search is another novelty for subscribers. Until now, Pocket could only search in article titles or URL addresses, thanks to full-text search it will be possible to search for keywords in content, author names or labels. After all, automatic tagging is also useful for this, where Pocket tries to generate appropriate tags based on the content, so, for example, in a review of an iPhone application, the article will be tagged with the tags "iphone", "ios" and the like. However, this feature is not entirely reliable, and it is often faster to search by specific name rather than trying to enter the auto-generated labels.
The subscription is available from the new version of the application in version 5.5, which was released this week in the App Store. Pocket is currently the most popular service of its kind, significantly surpassing its competitor Instapaper with 12 million users. Likewise, the service boasts a billion saved articles over the course of its existence.
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I have been using Pocket for 5 months on three devices (IP, iPad and PC) and it works great.