Pinterest acquires Instapaper

Pinterest has acquired Instapaper but says that the app would continue to operate as a separate entity. The Instapaper team including CEO Brian Donohue will join Pinterest where they will work both on the core Pinterest experience and updating Instapaper.

"Instapaper will work with us to continue building indexing and recommendations technologies, and we look forward to building great products together," Pinterest's lead project manager Steve Davis said in a statement.

Pinterest's acquisition marks the second time Instapaper has changed hands. Startup studio Betaworks bought a majority stake in the company in 2013 after founder Marco Arment said the app had "grown far beyond what one person can do."

Instapaper, an app that allows users to save articles to read later, may seem like an odd target for the visual bookmarking site at first glance. But it appears Pinterest is particularly interested in using the Instapaper team to help build out its search and discovery features.

The “save” part of Pinterest’s mantra (“discover, save, do”) is meant to be taken quite literally — collecting ideas and logging them for future action on various pin boards. Having those ideas logged gives users a reason to regularly come back to the site to accomplish things they were complementing at the time, but decided against acting upon.

One of the natural implications of having a better experience around saving content on Pinterest is giving the company ways to convert users into forms that potentially don’t exist yet.

The acquisition also raises the question of whether Instapaper could eventually be integrated into Pinterest, as many users already use the site to save articles, recipes, and other content. But it appears the plans is to keep the two separate - at least for now. A spokesperson for Pinterest tells Mashable there are no current plans to integrate the two products.