Instapaper is not a Platform

10 August 2012

I’ve been sporadically working on a project called papyr, for RiverGlide, since April. It was intended to scratch an itch that we had around making good reading material available at convenient times. You can read about the background, if you’re interested.

One of papyr’s two major dependencies is my favourite ‘read later’ service, Instapaper. We knew we wanted to make content available offline in a beautiful reading environment, and we were already Instapaper users. It seemed a natural fit.

Conceptually, papyr is very simple: it watches your Twitter timeline, looking for readable articles, rather than movies or images, for example, and saves them to a folder in your Instapaper account.

Two weeks ago we started allowing the first beta testers onto papyr. We quickly ran into problems, as our intended use of the API is technically against the Instapaper terms of use. Instapaper creator Marco Arment, explained his position in an email to me and made an exception for papyr, under the condition that we kept the volume per user to a reasonable amount per day, which we have done.

This whole experience has made me question our implementation of papyr. It partly solves the problem we had, but right now it’s at the expense of a service I value.

There was a timely discussion on this week’s episode of Marco’s podcast, Build and Analyze. During the show Marco answers a question relating to rate limiting, posed by a listener and Instapaper customer, who has also fallen foul of the new rate limits:

I did, about two weeks ago, as [Michael Festler] noted, add a rate limit to ‘adding things to read later’. And there were a few reasons for this. One of the biggest ones was that there’s a number of services cropping up out there, even though I forbid them in the API documentation, services that will basically pipe RSS feeds into your Instapaper account automatically. And what this results in, much more often than not, is people having thousands and thousands of unread items building up fairly quickly. And that pretty much ruins an Instapaper account for any real use.

That’s right: One of the offending services is papyr.

Marco goes on to explain: > And I don’t mean for everybody to read everything they save, I don’t even read everything I save; not even close, but, when you can very quickly build up ten thousand unread items, not only is the service not really meant for that and it’s very expensive for me to keep hosting, but it’s just bad for you, the user. > > Preventing that kind of build up, is important for the service to do, just to keep users from shooting themselves in the foot too bad. The service is not designed for that, it won’t work well with that. The app certainly won’t work well with that and it’s just a waste. It’s a waste for everybody.

I’ve experienced problems with the app on iPhone and iPad caused by these volumes. When the turnover of articles is high the app downloads hundreds of articles to the device whenever you launch it, which is twice per day when commuting.

Usually there isn’t time to load everything before losing signal (on a train, for example), which results in not having anything new to read. And now, because the older things have been pushed out to make room for the new, there isn’t anything to read at all.

The Instapaper iPad app, I have found, is also fairly unstable when dealing with a large turnover in articles. If I scan through a folder of one hundred unread items; reading, deleting, archiving and sharing as I go, the app will generally become unstable and crash after ten minutes. I can imagine this being a side effect of dealing with so many articles.

Marco also shared the article limit for each user: > So, I want to set this limit, somewhere that normal reasonable use is never likely to hit. And I think 120 per day, is not that bad of a number to set, maybe I’ll have to raise that; I’m certainly going to evaluate that. But I don’t understand, honestly, how somebody can save 120 things per day and actually read any meaningful portion of those.

And he’s right. Even on my best days I can only manage to read about twenty articles during a normal commute. And when I’m not commuting, as I haven’t been for the last few weeks, the unread list simply builds up to an unmanageable level.

Today I paused papyr for my account, which all papyr users have the ability to do. I haven’t been keeping up with what’s been saved for me recently, so it makes sense to take a break, and it will reduce the load on Instapaper a little.

But aren’t all Internet services, that expose APIs, designed to be mashed up and used to create amazing new things? Perhaps. But we should consider the cost to the provider and our impact on the service.

Some Internet services have grown large and successful because developers and third parties built on top of their APIs and created value that the service owners had never dreamed of.

They became platforms.

The best two examples, Facebook and Twitter are not, however, great examples of successful, sustainable businesses. One is hugely overvalued and its share price is currently collapsing under the weight of expectations, and the other still hasn’t figured out how to monetise its service, but its attempts have driven the early adopters to look around for something better.

Marco has created a business that sustains him and his family, simply by making a useful service, charging money for it and not spending more than he makes. He has, as far as I know, rejected offers to take funding.

For papyr, I believe this means that Instapaper can’t be part of our solution.

We built papyr with the genuine intention of solving a problem and making things easier. It’s not fair on Marco or the Instapaper customers, some of whom we hoped would become our customers, to burden the service in a way that Marco has specifically identified as detrimental for everyone.

Marco seems to be saying that Instapaper is not a platform: > So when you’re saving 49,000 or 50,000 articles, what could you possibly be using my service for that it’s going to work well for? > > That’s the big thing: What are you doing with all these things? And if the answer is, nothing you can possibly do with this can work well and can serve you well even, and I’m just taking on a big burden for hosting it all, what am I supposed to do?

If Instapaper is not a platform, then we’ll respect his decision and stop treating it as one.