Last Updated on February 28, 2017 by Larious
Mozilla Corporation announced the acquisition of Read it Later, Inc, the creators of the “save for later” service Pocket.
Pocket will become a new product in Mozilla’s product line alongside the Firefox web browser, and Pocket’s core development team will join Mozilla as well.
Mozilla’s relationship with Pocket dates back some time. The makers of the Firefox web browser integrated Pocket natively in the browser some time ago. Mozilla was criticized for the move by part of the browser’s user base. Some did not understand why Pocket needed to be integrated into Firefox as Pocket was available as a browser extension already.
Others did not like the integration because it would blow up the browser even more. Others questioned Mozilla’s motive for the integration.
Pocket users liked the integration for the most part obviously. It is unclear up to today if the integration fueled the growth of Pocket, and by how much.
It was revealed however some time later that Mozilla did have a revenue share agreement with Pocket.
Pocket is now available as a system add-on in Firefox. System add-ons are distributed by Mozilla with the Firefox web browser. It is still possible to disable Pocket in Firefox though.
Mozilla’s acquisition of Pocket
Mozilla’s blog post published on the official Mozilla blog focuses on content discovery, and the Context Graph initiative.
Activity Stream is one of the products that came out of Context Graph. It is a redesign of the Firefox New Tab Page and about:home page that is scheduled to launch in Firefox 56.
According to Mozilla, Pocket’s focus will be “promoting the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content”.
It seems likely that Mozilla plans to use Pocket’s technology to improve the content discovery features of the Firefox web browser.
One of the appeals of Pocket is that users have saved more than 3 billion pieces of content so far, a treasure trove for an organization who tries to introduce content discovery in the web browser. Pocket will join Mozilla’s Open Source project.
The announcement by Nate Weiner, CEO of Pocket, confirms the deal. According to the post, Pocket benefits from the acquisition in several ways; from Mozilla’s resources, global scale, and options to increase the number of Pocket users further.
What about Pocket Premium? The paid service was not mentioned by Mozilla nor Pocket, and it appears as if it will still be offered in the same way just like before.