September 6, 2016

Pinterest makes new app acquisition

Pinterest's new acquisition continues a trend of similar deals and offerings.

A new Pinterest purchase both adds to the company's resources and keeps two distinct entities separate. In a recent announcement, Instapaper stated that it would join Pinterest, the popular content curating tool. Despite this latest deal, though, the statement assured users that basic functions would stay the same, even with some upcoming new moves from the service.

Among these changes, the company mergers will retire Instaparser, a developer-facing browsing enhancement tool, this November. The Instapaper team said this was part of its move toward more benefits for end users. 

The business' parser technology will be part of what it brings to Pinterest. The headquarters will also relocate from New York City to San Francisco. Instapaper's current owners, betaworks, previously bought the app in 2013 and claims to have improved its functionality since then.

This has been just the most recent of several similar acquisitions and updates. Forbes recently listed some of the moves the company has made in the past few months, including Promoted Pins, the announcement of the new native video player and a buyout of Math Camp, the company that created the social app Highlight. Contributor Paul Armstrong commented on the deal and what Pinterest's future moves could possibly be.

"Personally, I would like to see a bolder Pinterest, one that takes the future of shopping and really pushes new ground whether that is through AI, consumer psychology, predictive algorithms or something new…more organic," Armstrong wrote.  The future of social commerce is still to be written and Pinterest may just lose out if it doesn't get the mix right."

Unlike Instapaper, which was founded in 2008, Highlight was released in 2012 and reportedly never achieved mainstream success, the Verge wrote. This acquisition took place in July 2016.