One year ago, we became Pocket. When we first decided to change our name (from Read It Later), we wanted to dramatically change the experience of saving for later—and your response has been incredible.

Pocket users now save more than 35 million items per month, our service has expanded to new platforms (Pocket for Mac, Chrome and Safari), and our network of developers and publishers has grown to nearly 12,000.

To our users, we just want to say a heartfelt: Thank you.

It seems only fitting that we’d celebrate Pocket’s first birthday with a new feature designed to rethink another core element of the Pocket experience:

Sharing with the People Who Matter Most

While “broadcasting” to social networks (like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) is popular, Pocket users still share via email more than twice as often.

Today’s Pocket update introduces a completely redesigned Share Menu—and we’re excited to introduce Send to Friend, a simple way to share with anyone without leaving Pocket.

Like all Pocket releases, it’s available now across our platform—including iPhone and iPad, Android, Mac and the web.

Here’s what’s new:

1. All-New Share Menu with Friend Shortcuts

Pocket’s redesigned Share Menu with Send to Friend includes shortcuts that make it easier to share with recent friends. The Share Menu also adapts to your most recently used services, like Twitter, Facebook, Evernote or Buffer.

2. Send to Friend

The all-new Send to Friend makes it easier to share content that matters to you with the people who matter most. With just a couple of taps you can share content from Pocket with anyone, along with a comment and a highlighted quote. They’ll receive an email with the link, and if they’re a Pocket user, they’ll also be notified right in Pocket.

3. An Inbox to Add Shared Content to Your List

When another Pocket user shares with you, it will appear in your Pocket inbox. Here, you can see their comments along with any highlighted quotes they chose to share with you.

4. Notifications When Someone Shares with You

We’ve enhanced notifications so that, in addition to email, you can now choose to receive a push notification right on your phone or tablet when a friend shares with you.

***

We’re excited to see what you think of these new features, and thank you again for an amazing first year as Pocket. As always, can find us at Pocket Support to share your questions or feedback.

Get Pocket for iPhone and iPad, Android, Mac and the web. It’s free.

For our users in China: Pocket现已正式登陆豌豆荚！

Three of our partners have big updates this month that make saving to Pocket simple:

Feedly for iOS and Android

Saying goodbye to Google Reader? Feedly is one Pocket-friendly option for users who are searching for an RSS reader. Their new apps for iOS and Android, released this week, include shortcuts for quickly saving to Pocket. Just set up Pocket in your settings—you’ll then get a shortcut at the top of the app (above), and you’ll be able to long-press on any item in Feedly to save it for later.

WordPress.com

If you have a blog on WordPress.com, you can enable easy saving to Pocket from your own site. Just choose the Pocket option in the Settings > Sharing menu and it will appear along with your social sharing buttons:

If you have a self-hosted site on WordPress, you can add the Pocket button using the latest Jetpack plugin update. Or you can create your own Save to Pocket button.

HootSuite

We’re excited to announce that HootSuite’s latest update for iOS features Pocket support! Just go to Settings > Read Later to turn on Pocket with just a tap:

HootSuite is also offering Pocket users a free month of HootSuite Pro ($9.99 value) if you sign up for a Pro account at HootSuite.com and use coupon code HOOTPOCKETPRO.

***

To learn more about the hundreds of apps that make it easy to save to Pocket, check out our app directory.

For more than 8.5 million users, Pocket is changing how we consume content. “Save to Pocket” can extend the life of content by weeks and months—and for users, Pocket increases the amount of quality content they can consume, across multiple devices, at any time.

This longer lifespan means stories can find a new life beyond their original run. Imagine if serial TV dramas like “Breaking Bad” or “Downton Abbey” had been on television before the DVR: If we only had one chance to watch them, at one specific time, would they have thrived?

“Save for later” is ushering in a similar era for web content. It means creating new possibilities for publishers—to better understand the life of their content in Pocket, and make the experience better for their audience.

Today we’re excited to introduce Pocket for Publishers, a new, free way for publishers to look beyond real-time trends and start exploring what it means to consider the lifetime of their content—and use new tools that make the most of the Pocket ecosystem.

More than a dozen major publishers are already participating, including The Washington Post, Vox Media (The Verge, SB Nation and Polygon), WordPress, USA Today, Time.com, Wired, BuzzFeed, Bloomberg Businessweek, New York Review of Books, The Awl, Mother Jones, The Next Web, Matter, Aeon Magazine, and more.

If you’re a site publisher, you can sign up today to request access.

Here’s What’s in Pocket for Publishers:

1. See How Your Content Is Performing in Pocket

As more sites embrace timeless, high-quality content, impact and longevity matter. Publishers can now access a custom dashboard to view the extended life of their stories or videos over weeks and months. The dashboard includes lists of top content and authors, and new metrics you’ll only see from Pocket that focus on longevity and engagement.

2. Create Custom Footer Messages in Pocket

With Pocket for Publishers, you can add a custom text footer message that will appear at the bottom of any article saved from your site. Use it to highlight related content, your apps or social media accounts, or even a newsletter or subscription. We’re excited to see how publishers use it.

3. Add a ‘Save to Pocket’ Button to Your Site and WordPress

Adding a ‘Save to Pocket’ button on your site makes it easy for your readers to access your stories anywhere, on every major mobile and tablet platform. You can also include a save count badge to show the total saves to Pocket. View an example of the “Save to Pocket” button on The Awl.

Add a “Save to Pocket” button for your site.

We’re also thrilled to announce the “Save to Pocket” button is available for all WordPress.com sites and very soon will be available for self-hosted sites using the sharing feature available with the Jetpack plugin.

4. Integrate Site Subscription for Paywall Content

Because Pocket is already available on every major mobile and tablet platform, sites can focus on compelling content, not app development. For publishers with premium paywalled content, our Site Subscription feature lets your paying customers access paywalled content from right inside Pocket. Recent partners include The New York Review of Books, VQR and Matter.

Learn more about Site Subscription

5. Add Pocket Integration to Your App

For publishers who already have an app, “Save to Pocket” is one of the most popular share menu options, and you can save to Pocket from the most popular apps, including Twitter, Flipboard, The Verge, Zite, Tweetbot and more.

Learn how to use Pocket’s SDK in your app.

***

This is just the beginning, and we’re excited to hear what you think. If you have questions or comments, you can reach us at publishers@getpocket.com.

Get started with Pocket for Publishers

Special thanks to all of our early publisher partners:

• The Washington Post
• USA Today
• BuzzFeed
• The Verge
• Bloomberg Businessweek
• WordPress
• Time.com
• Wired
• Mother Jones
• The Awl
• SB Nation
• New York Review of Books
• GigaOm
• The Next Web
• Polygon
• Matter
• PaidContent
• AppAdvice
• The Billfold
• iMore
• Aeon Magazine
• Longreads

Just like the DVR changed how we enjoy TV—and even what types of shows we watch—”save for later” is having the same effect on web content. After the initial flurry of tweets and Facebook posts dies down, stories can find an extended life in Pocket.

So, how long do stories live in Pocket?

To find out an article’s extended life, we can look at its most active consumption period on the web compared to Pocket. For the purposes of this post, we’ll measure the number of days it takes for an article to reach 80% of its total consumption.

Below is a breakdown of web activity for BuzzFeed’s 4,500-word story on the history of Atari’s Pong, published in November and written by Chris Stokel-Walker. The story’s most active consumption period on the web was 10 days—but when we look at “opens” in Pocket, the story’s most active period was 35 days:

It’s important to note that BuzzFeed’s traffic for the story is much larger than Pocket’s activity, but you see a clear extension of that story’s lifespan when you compare the two.

We see similar behavior when comparing an article’s activity on Twitter versus its activity in Pocket. For this Verge article about the Microsoft Surface by Tom Warren, its Twitter activity had a most active period of two days. In Pocket, it was six days:

And here’s the life of a video, “The ABC of Architects” by Federico Gonzalez, posted on Vimeo. The most active period for Vimeo views was 12 days, and in Pocket it was 18 days:

Why Does Lifespan Matter?

As users continue to consume content across multiple devices, including tablets and phones, we think it’s important to investigate not just the popularity of a story or video, but its longevity. When high-quality content can continue to thrive for more than a month, as in the case with BuzzFeed, we view that as a positive development for publishers.

The longer you let people hold on to content, the better the odds that they’ll end up consuming it. The more they consume it, the more likely they are to share it across social media—and the longer that story lives everywhere.

At Pocket, we’re excited to work with publishers to explore how longevity can help high-quality content. If you’re a publisher and want to learn more, or see the lifespan of your stories, email us at publishers@getpocket.com.

There is nothing better than an organized Pocket—and if you’re a Safari or Chrome user, we’ve updated our tagging feature to make it even faster for you to use in your browser.

Our latest updates to Pocket for Safari and Chrome now let you autocomplete tags as you type them. So, if you tend to forget what tags you use for labeling content (was it “recipe” or “recipes”?) this will be welcome news.

The updates to Pocket for Safari and Chrome also include a number of new improvements, including one-click saving for popular sites like Reddit, Twitter’s Discover page and Hacker News.

Download Pocket for Safari and Chrome. It’s free:

Pocket 1.5 for Safari

Pocket 1.5 for Chrome

Here’s a list of what’s new:

New:
★ Tags autocomplete as you type, and conveniently show your recently used tags
★ Pocket buttons now included on Reddit, Hacker News, and Twitter’s Discover page
★ Notification bar remains visible while the mouse hovers over it
★ Customize the keyboard shortcut for saving to Pocket
★ Support for Retina displays

Fixes:
✓ Improvements to the display of the Pocket save link on Twitter.com
✓ In Google Reader, clicking the Pocket button now saves the selected article
✓ Better experience when saving pages while not logged in
✓ Scroll position no longer jumps to the top while typing tags in Safari
✓ Other bug fixes and security enhancements

As always, you can reach us at Pocket Support for any questions or issues. Thanks and enjoy!

Team Pocket

Our latest Pocket update is available now for iPhone and iPad, with new features for sharing, reading, and deleting from your list.

With Pocket 4.3 for iOS, you can share to Facebook more easily using iOS 6′s native integration for iPhone and iPad. We’ve also added an increased font size for reading in the Article View, and a shortcut to delete items after you’re finished with an article or video.

Download Pocket 4.3 for iPhone and iPad

Here’s a list of what’s in our latest update:

NEW
• Share to Facebook and Sina Weibo (新浪微博) using the account on your device (iOS 6 only)
• Delete articles directly while reading—just tap and hold the Archive button
• Jump all the way back to your list after opening links while reading—just tap and hold the Back button
• Increase the maximum font size in Article View
• The Get Started tutorial is now available from Help at any time

FIXED
• Sharing certain articles to Evernote no longer displays an error
• Evernote International users in China can now log in
• Saving to Evernote while offline no longer causes a crash
• Tweet Attribution will now appear while using Pocket offline
• Gap no longer appears below the last item in the list
• Other bug fixes, design refinements, and improvements

As always you can go to Pocket Support for questions or feedback. We’re excited for what’s to come in 2013—thanks for your continued support!

-Team Pocket

A year later, we’ve settled in with our new name (Pocket!), we have a community that has nearly doubled in size—and as the chart below demonstrates, activity has taken off, inside Pocket and across our developer community.

All told, you “saved to Pocket” 240 million times from January through December, more than the prior four years combined.

What’s Popular in Pocket

Your most-saved article this year? “Obama’s Way,” Michael Lewis’s 13,000-word presidential portrait for Vanity Fair. Its popularity demonstrated the power of save-for-later when it comes to empowering people to embrace longform reading. In fact, 80 percent of all “opens” in Pocket happened after the story’s initial four-day rush of popularity—and for every one person who read “Obama’s Way” in Pocket, they introduced the article to an average of 1.4 others outside of Pocket.

The most-saved video in Pocket was (surprise!) PSY’s “Gangnam Style.” The music video remained within 50% of its peak popularity in Pocket for a whopping 58 days, and the graphic below shows that it truly was a viral phenomenon. The video didn’t even peak in Pocket until 70 days after it was first posted.

Thank You

As the holidays approach, we just wanted to say thank you for an incredible year. You helped turn Pocket into a chart-topping (and award-winning) app for iPhone, iPad, Android and Mac, and your feedback has helped us make Pocket a simple, enjoyable way to save and view the content that matters to you.

Here’s one more data point we’re really proud of: Pocket released more than 40 updates this year across iOS, Android, Mac and beyond.

We’re excited for what’s next in 2013. Happy holidays from the entire Pocket team.
 

What We Saved to Pocket in 2012

10 Most-Saved Articles

1. “Obama’s Way” (Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair)
2. “The ‘Busy’ Trap” (Tim Kreider, New York Times)
3. “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking” (Mat Honan, Wired)
4. “I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’’s How” (Gabriel Wyner, Lifehacker)
5. “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet” (Mat Honan, Gizmodo)
6. “How Google Builds Its Maps——and What It Means for the Future of Everything” (Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic)
7. “Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS” (Chris Ziegler, The Verge)
8. “Microsoft’’s Lost Decade” (Kurt Eichenwald, Vanity Fair)
9. “Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’’t Protect Us Anymore” (Mat Honan, Wired)
10. “Why passwords have never been weaker, and crackers have never been stronger” (Dan Goodin, Ars Technica)

10 Most-Saved Videos

1. Gangnam Style (4 min.)
2. Salman Khan at TED 2011 (20 min.)
3. Bret Victor – Inventing on Principle (54 min.)
4. Sight (8 min.)
5. Dumb Ways to Die (3 min.)
6. DC Shoes: Ken Block’s Gymkhana Five (10 min.)
7. View from the ISS at Night (4 min.)
8. Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are (21 min.)
9. KONY 2012 (30 min.)
10. A Conversation with My 12-Year-Old Self (4 min.)

This week we introduced an improved way for readers to access the content they love inside Pocket: Called Site Subscription, this updated feature lets you easily log in from Pocket to access websites that require a paid subscription or registration.

Today we’ve added two new publishers to Pocket’s Site Subscription, and they’re two highly acclaimed magazines—The New York Review of Books and VQR.

The New York Review of Books ($74.95/year) and VQR ($32/year) both feature an expansive digital archive for their paid subscribers, so we’ve made it easier for their subscribers to access those stories in Pocket.

Here’s how Pocket’s Site Subscription works:

1. You can save subscriber-only articles just like you’d save any article to Pocket. When you open that article in Pocket, you’ll be prompted to login to the site.

2. Enter your credentials for that site’s subscription, and then Pocket will automatically pull up the full text of the article.

3. You’re all set! Once you’ve entered your site credentials you won’t need to do so again, unless you delete the app or log out of your services.

If you’re a publisher with a digital subscription or paywall, it’s easy to make this feature available to your readers—at no cost, and with no development work on your end.

Just email us at publishers@getpocket.com and we’ll be happy to get your site subscription working in Pocket.

Pocket is committed to helping publishers and readers make the most of save-for-later, and we’re excited to share more news in the weeks and months to come.

-Mark Armstrong
Editorial Director, Pocket

Digital publishing is evolving rapidly, and earlier this year, we met two journalists, Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson, who decided to launch their own project on Kickstarter, called MATTER.

Their goal was to create a digital publishing company for original longform storytelling in the realm of science, technology and the future.

They hoped to raise $50,000. Instead, they raised more than $140,000.

Today we’re thrilled to announce that MATTER and Pocket have teamed up to help readers enjoy these new stories with Pocket—on any tablet, phone or computer, even offline.

When you subscribe to MATTER for 99 cents a month, it means you can also access their stories in Pocket. Using our Site Subscription feature, you’ll be able to quickly save MATTER stories to Pocket—and when you’re in Pocket, you can log into MATTER to begin reading it.

Pocket has become an important tool for millions of people, and we’re excited to help publishers like MATTER make it easy for their subscribers to save and enjoy those stories anywhere.

Read their first piece, “Do No Harm,” a haunting story by Anil Ananthaswamy about “being at war with your own body.”

***

We talked with MATTER co-founder Jim Giles about the launch. 

How did MATTER first come together? 

It was a combination of frustration about science and technology journalism, together with the emergence of a new business model. Bobbie and I feel that there isn’t enough really great long-form reporting on sci/tech, particularly investigative work. We know lots of sci/tech reporters with strong stories to tell and nowhere to publish them. Then we saw The Atavist and Byliner make a success of what’s being called the “singles” model: selling individual long-form articles on e-reader platforms like the Kindle store. We figured we could adapt that model and use to publish this missing content.

Why did you decide to use Kickstarter? 

There’s an obvious answer: it’s a great way to raise money. But an equally wonderful thing about Kickstarter is the community that you build by raising money on the site. We’re now connected to over 2,500 people who really want MATTER to succeed. We want to use this community to help guide the evolution of MATTER. The first step is collaborative commissioning—we’ve using an online tool called All Our Ideas that allows communities to prioritise ideas, in this case stories.

What are your own personal reading habits? (i.e. What devices do you use? Where do you find your reading material? When do you do most of your reading?)

I’m a huge admirer of the traditional homes of long-form journalism, places like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s and the New York Review of Books. I prefer reading them in print, but I now do more reading on my iPad. I have a long Pocket list! I’m also excited by the long-form material that’s being published by blogs. Wired’s Threat Level blog has published some really strong pieces and Adrian Chen at Gawker has had a string of excellent pieces recently. There are also some startups that are producing very thoughtful stuff, like Aeon Magazine in the U.K.

How much is in your Pocket list? And does that concern you? (It shouldn’t!)

Hold on…okay, just checked. About 15 long-form articles. But I’m about to get on an 11-hour flight, so that’s no bad thing Top of the list is “The Man Who Smelled Too Much” in LA Weekly.

Where did you go for design inspiration when it came to your site?

We wanted to create a clean, clutter-free reading environment. We also wanted to make the pieces feel valuable. I hope we succeeded! I’ve been looking at the site for so long that I can’t tell. For inspiration, we turned to sites like Fray.com, The Great Discontent and The Bold Italic. But, most importantly, we were lucky enough to work with an amazing team of designers at Clearleft in the U.K.

We have some good news for Pocket users who use apps like Evernote, Twitter and Tweetbot: Our latest iOS update includes improvements for each.

For Evernote, we’ve added new features that make it easier for Pocket users to save what they love between the two apps—you can select notebooks, add prefilled tags, and also include the full article when you save something.

With Twitter, we’ve updated Tweet Attribution with support for replying, favoriting, retweeting, and opening a tweet on Twitter.com. If you prefer Tweetbot, you can now open the app directly from Pocket to send tweets or drop something into your drafts folder.

Finally, Pocket 4.2.6 also includes a number of other bug fixes and improvements.

Download Pocket 4.2.6 for iOS in the App Store

Here’s a complete list of what’s in Pocket 4.2.6:

New
★ Improvements to Evernote sharing, including notebook selection, preservation of tags, comments, and option to include the full article
★ Sharing to Evernote now supports the 印象笔记 service in China
★ Tweet Attribution redesigned, with support for replying, favoriting, retweeting, opening a tweet in Safari, and opening a person’s Twitter profile in Safari
★ Share to Tweetbot

General Fixes
✓ Toolbar buttons are now easier to tap
✓ The Pocket logo at the top of the list will no longer appear visually distorted
✓ Fixed an issue where items in the list were occasionally not tappable
✓ Fixed an issue where authorizing 3rd-party apps would hang on older devices

Reader Fixes
✓ Rotation lock now works properly in the Reader
✓ ESPN Insider subscribers can now log in by going to Options > Manage Site Subscriptions
✓ A number of other bug fixes and improvements

Sharing Fixes
✓ Fixed issues when logging in to Pinboard and Delicious
✓ App.net has much improved error handling and some fixes when adding comments to shared items
✓ The font size has been increased when sharing to Buffer

If you have any questions or feedback, you can always reach us at Pocket Support.

Enjoy!

-Team Pocket