Social networking site Pinterest has acquired Instapaper, the app for storing and reading online content.
The expertise and technology from Instapaper will be used in Pinterest’s discovery products.
The company will also experiment with using its parsing technology for the Rich Pin feature in Pinterest.
Instapaper will also be working on Pinterest-related products and will receive help from the Pinterest engineering team.
Instapaper will continue to operate as a separate app. The Instapaper team will move to Pinterest’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Instapaper CEO Brian Donohue is joining Pinterest as a product engineer
Instapaper also revealed that it would be ending its developer product, Instaparser. The company is ceasing signups for the programme and halting billing for existing customers. The programme will continue running until 1 November 2016.
Instapaper allows users to save and store articles for reading, including offline and on-the-go. Users can find material online and save it on their internet-enabled device, including iOS and Android devices, before reading it when the internet connection is not available.
Users drag a “Read Later” bookmarklet to their browser page and click it on the page that they wish to save. That article is added to a user's personal unread queue on Instapaper, which can be visited on any device.
In the statement announcing the acquisition, Instapaper acknowledged that there was a “lot of overlap between Pinterest and Instapaper.”
Pinterest has a generally more social focus, with users sharing content publicly with other users of the site rather than saving it for personal perusal.
Instapaper was founded in 2008 by Marco Arment and was acquired by betaworks three years ago.
Financial details of this new acquisition were not disclosed.
CEO Brian Donohue said that Pinterest will “not be pushing some separate agenda that alters the app or user-experience.”
“We will be working very hard at Pinterest to bring you the same great service by the same team, just under a new parent company,” he said.
