Marco Arment’s sold read-it-later service Instapaper to Betaworks. My first responses to this were “good for him,” swiftly followed by “I hope Betaworks don’t mess this up,” along with mulling over an investigation of Pocket. (I like both Instapaper and Pocket, but had largely stuck with Instapaper because I, where possible, support indies.)

For some reason, Chris Taylor over at Mashable had a massive bitch in his coverage of the sale, subtitled “why the big fuss?”

It really is an astonishing piece of… well, I want to say journalism, but it reads more like something you’d find on the Daily Mail website and turn your nose up at. Right away, the piece makes Taylor’s seeming distaste for Instapaper very clear:

Do you use Instapaper? No, me neither. But the $3.99 app, which lets you save stuff to read later when outside a wifi or 3G zone, has a small and highly devoted following. Which is why a small segment of Twitter went nuts at the news Thursday that Instapaper was being bought by Betaworks

Why the aggression? Why the not-so-subtle sneering at people who use and love an app? Why the immediate disconnect with the article’s own title, which asked “why the fuss?” and then noted the app’s “devoted following”? I would ask Taylor, but he’s probably busy making giant Instapaper logos that he can kick the shit out of in a murderous rage.

Arment has been spending an increasing amount of time on another project. He’s founder and editorial director of an online paid magazine devoted to mid-length features, brashly titled The Magazine. His enthusiasm for Instapaper appears to have been waning for some time. Reviews of the lastest version in the iTunes store suggest it got buggy and crashed a lot. [sic]

I read the reviews for the latest version (although not the lastest version, because I’m not sure what that means) on the US and UK stores. Oddly, the UK store reviews are generally people wanting to high-five Arment, or grumbling that Instapaper’s not Pocket. A few people were complaining about crashes. On the US store, there are admittedly quite a few people complaining about app stability, although many more going down the high-five route.

I’ve not witnessed any such problems myself (which, given my usual tech halos of doom is perhaps some kind of technology karma), but to argue this is down to Arment lacking enthusiasm is pretty low, not least because Taylor also quotes Arment as stating Instapaper

has simply grown far beyond what one person can do

Classy.

For good measure, there’s also a smattering of inaccuracy:

Two years ago, Apple stepped onto Instapaper’s turf in a major way by adding a “reading list” feature to its Safari app on iPhone and iPad. The reading list allowed users to save pages to read them later, rendering the paid iPhone app Instapaper largely irrelevant.

As anyone who’s used Reading List will know, although it has some similarities with Instapaper (and other read-it-later services), it’s a very different beast. In downloading entire web pages (design and all), it’s a hell of a lot slower, for one, and it also doesn’t just rip out the content from a page and give you that, using your preferred fonts and other settings. I don’t know anyone who checked out Reading List and stopped using Instapaper, Pocket or Readability.

Still, at least Taylor stopped there. Oh no, my mistake:

But Betaworks is building a reputation for turning around aggregation products thought to be lost causes, judging by the reception for the new Digg.

That’s my emphasis, there: Instapaper: thought to be a lost cause! That really needs the caveat “by Chris Taylor, who’s inexplicably angry about Instapaper, perhaps because he imagined it travelled back in time and gave him a massive wedgie in the playground, while yelling MARCO ARMENT IS YOUR GOD, PUNY FUTURE HACK”.

That is the only explanation.