Instapaper launches a new Instaparser API for developers
Instapaper, the popular read-it-later service originally developed by Marco Arment but now owned and maintained by Betaworks, has announced a new service that allows developers to take advantage of the app's own recently added parsing tools.
Tools for developers
Announcing the news on the Instapaper blog, Betaworks notes that significant developer interest in the Instapaper parser (which launched in January) has prompted the folks behind the application to launch the API. The Instapaper parser grabs content from Web pages, optimizes them for mobile devices, and cleans up the overall experience of reading content on the Internet.
There are actually three separate APIs which are included as part of the parser: Article, Text, and Document:
- The Article API is a comprehensive parse of all body text, images, and videos associated with the content. This is the API Instapaper uses to optimize how websites are displayed on mobile devices.
- The Text API extracts just the body text of the page, which is particularly useful for natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and other text-based analysis.
- The Document API lets you upload your HTML directly to parse content that isn’t publicly viewable or is behind a paywall.
And access to all of the above are, as Betaworks explains, included in all of the Instaparser plans. Aside from a free trial, three separate plans, Beta, Live, and Scale, are designed to accomodate increasing volume requests.
- Beta Plan: $99/month for 100,000 calls per month with a rate limit of 5 calls per second.
- Live Plan: $399/month for 500,000 calls per month with a rate limit of 25 calls per second.
- Scale Plan: $699/month for 1 million calls per month with a rate limit of 50 calls per second.
The developer adds that there's “no long-term commitment required,” and as such developers can “change plans or cancel at any time.” For more information, developers can visit the Instaparser Plans page, and there's also the option of signing-up for a free Trial plan, too.
The best read-it-later service
Though it's a hotly-debated topic, Instapaper is, in my opinion, the best read-it-later service out there. It offers clean text extraction from Web content, the application features a great user interface (UI), and the all-round experience of using Instapaper has never been anything but splendid. There's also an Instapaper Premium service for users to choose from, too: this costs $2.99 per month, it adds full text search, ultimited notes, text-to-speech playlists, and unlimited speed-reading usage.
You can download Instapaper using the link below; it's free of charge, and optimized for the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad.
I can't wait to see what developers do with Instaparser. Of course, we'll keep you posted with further information as we receive it.