Social Network Pinterest Scoops up Read-it-Later Service Instapaper

In a blog post, Instapaper said the service and companion iPhone and iPad app will continue to live on:

Today, we’re excited to announce that Instapaper is joining Pinterest. In the three years since betaworks acquired Instapaper from Marco Arment, we’ve completely rewritten our backend, overhauled our mobile and web clients, improved parsing and search, and introduced tons of great features like highlights, text-to-speech, and speed reading to the product.

All of these features and developments revolved around the core mission of Instapaper, which is allowing our users to discover, save, and experience interesting web content. In that respect, there is a lot of overlap between Pinterest and Instapaper. Joining Pinterest provides us with the additional resources and experience necessary to achieve that shared mission on a much larger scale.

Instapaper provides a compelling source for news-based content, and we’re excited to take those learnings to Pinterest’s discovery products. We’ll also be experimenting with using our parsing technology for certain Rich Pin types.

For its part, Pinterest said in a statement, as reported by Engadget, that the acquisition was made “to accelerate discovering and saving articles on Pinterest.”

Instapaper is designed for the iPhone/iPod touch and all iPad models. It can be downloaded now on the App Store for free. A premium subscription, which costs $2.99 per month or $29.99 annually unlocks a number of great features like full text search, unlimited highlights, and more.

Pinterest’s acquisition definitely makes a lot of sense and helps cement its status as the place to go to save both written and visual content.