"Joining Pinterest provides us with the additional resources and experience necessary to achieve that shared mission on a much larger scale", Instapaper wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
Instapaper is only the latest acquisition by Pinterest, though most have been so-called "aqui-hires", a tech industry term for acquisitions done as a way to hire a company's team without interest in its previous product.
In other words, Pinterest seems interested in Instapaper's recommendation algorithm as a way to surface relevant Pins to its users.
Pinterest's acquisition marks the second time Instapaper has changed hands. The Instapaper team says that their app has grown a lot since then, and it now has tools and content that will compliment Pinterest's existing services. In contrast to previous deals, this time Pinterest has picked up both the technology and a majority of the team in its move to boost content sharing on the service.
The similarity between why people use Pinterest and why they use Instapaper is nearly too close for the deal to make sense.
After selling a majority stake to Betaworks in 2013, the company tried to bolster its offerings by rewriting its back end, overhauling its mobile and Web clients, improving parsing and search, and introducing various features like highlights, text-to-speech and speed reading. The purchase comes three years after Betaworks, the firm behind Digg, bought Instapaper from creator Marco Arment who now developes the popular podcast player Overcast.
More news: Paul's Gwen Jorgensen wins women's Rio Olympic triathlon gold medal
Fast forward to today, and the service is owned by Pinterest. "We'll also be experimenting with using our parsing technology for certain Rich Pin types".
Two of Instapaper's three employees will join Pinterest and move from NY to the company's San Francisco headquarters.
"As the world's catalog of ideas, we're focused on making it easy to save and discover content on any device".
The company will be sunsetting Instaparser, an API that allows developers to extract article content from web pages.
"There is a lot of overlap between Pinterest and Instapaper".
