videos, Web pages, recipes, images, shopping info, and other miscellany. And users are finding these materials not just on the Web, but on Twitter and on the 700-plus Web and mobile apps that integrate with Pocket.
“Facebook only sees maybe a 15 percent slice of all content” that users want to share or save, Weiner says. “Flipboard may only see 10 percent. Pocket has the whole, broad view. That gives us a signal that nobody else has.”
In practical terms, Pocket Preferences is nothing more than an API, or application programming interface—a set of guidelines for how outside developers can connect to Pocket’s data. If an app supports Pocket Preferences, that fact will only be evident to users when they’re prompted to connect their local accounts to their Pocket accounts. At that point, information about the material users are adding to their Pocket lists (including their favored topics, sites, and authors) will continuously influence the selection of material they see in the other apps.
For users of Zite, the benefit of connecting with Pocket is getting better article recommendations, says Mike Klaas, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “Especially for a new Zite user, linking a rich Pocket account lets us personalize in a way that isn’t possible by picking a few topics,” Klaas says. “The more we can learn about what the user reads, the better. We aren’t replacing parts of Zite personalization with Pocket’s personalization, but augmenting it.”
Pocket itself is still a pretty good place to absorb content, and Weiner’s crew isn’t neglecting the company’s original goal of making a reading app that’s slicker and more powerful than competitors like Instapaper, Readability, or the Reading List feature in Apple’s Safari browser.
The 5.0 version of the Pocket app includes a new “Highlights” feature designed to help users rediscover items they may have saved long ago. The categories in Highlights include Long Reads (items over 1500 words), Quick Reads (less than 300 words), Trending (items other users are also saving and sharing), and Best Of. Pocket also generates categories automatically based on the sites where you save articles most frequently (The New York Times, The Atlantic and The New Yorker showed up in my highlights) and the general topics you read about (e.g., startups, Android, baseball).
The Best Of category is probably the most intriguing part of Highlights. Weiner says it’s assembled using factors like which items Pocket users re-open most often, and whether they read all the way to the end. “We are trying to separate out quality from saves,” he says. “Saves maps to raw popularity, but it doesn’t measure engagement or quality.” The Best Of category also uses what Pocket calls Impact Rank, an index the company has been sharing with media companies since February through its publisher program.
There weren’t any new clues at Wednesday’s Pocket press event about how the company—which has raised $7.5 million in venture backing from Google Ventures, Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures, and Founder Collective—intends to make money. Its apps and services are free, as is the new Preferences API.
[Correction, 11/14/13, 9:45 a.m.: In a previous version of this story, the preceding paragraph included this sentence: “The general idea is that Pocket will eventually have enough users and enough data to strike deals with the publishers and e-commerce companies whose content is showing up in Pocket lists.” Weiner contacted me by e-mail to correct that statement, saying “None of these things are currently a part of our revenue strategy.” He also emphasizes that Pocket Preferences is not part of Pocket’s revenue strategy. “Preferences is a new feature for users to help make all of the apps they use with Pocket a lot better,” he writes. “Users can take Preferences to the apps they choose, it’s up to them. And like everything we do with Pocket, it’s entirely private. Their preferences and data never leave Pocket unless they request it.”]
By putting itself at the center of a growing ecosystem of content-aggregation apps, Pocket seems to be trying to cement its reputation as a one-stop shop for data about what consumers are actually interested in. “Right now we are still focused on really expanding the platform, getting this to more people, and helping all the apps get connected,” Weiner says. “We do have some things we are going to start talking about with revenue, probably early next year.”
