Pocket (discontinued)
★★★☆☆
May 2025: It took me 11 years to update this review. Less than a month later, Mozilla announced they’re shutting Pocket down this summer. Fortunately I’d already tried out Wallabag, which is a good replacement for the read-it-later aspect.
I’ve been using Pocket for ages to offload “Hey, this looks interesting” articles from times when I really should be doing something else to times when I have, well, time. And when I say “ages,” I mean it: I was using it back when it was still called Read It Later, long before Mozilla bought it.
- It syncs a copy of the article to each mobile device, which means I can see something in the morning, save it to Pocket, then read it on my tablet at lunch.
- Feedly talks to it easily. Back when I used Feedly, I even linked it up with IFTTT so that tapping “Save for Later” on the tablet will add an article to Pocket. This also helped make up a bit for Feedly’s lack of offline access.
- Speaking of IFTTT and online services I don’t use anymore, for a while I had it set it up so that saving an article as a favorite in Pocket also added it to Delicious.
- The Android app will accept shares even if there’s no network connection, then sync up when it’s online. That means I can look over a newsletter in Gmail at lunch, save the links that look interesting, and archive the email. Then I can read the article at work or at home…or the next time I’m out somewhere, after it’s synced.
- Kobo eReaders can connect to Pocket and you can read your saved articles on something that’s actually designed for reading.
You can save pages to Pocket using a browser extension for all the major desktop browser types, including Chromium, Firefox and Safari. For others, you can get a bookmarklet from getPocket.com/add while logged in. And just share a URL or page to the mobile app.
Mission Creep
For a while, Pocket had a “recommend” button, which let you add a page to a public feed. I thought this was great! It meant I could use one service for bookmarks, saving to read later, and linkblogging!
Eventually Mozilla discontinued manual “recommendations” in favor of an automatic recommendation engine based on what you saved, and what other people were saving. (And sponsored articles, of course.) Your saved articles were “private” from other users, but not from the engine.
A lot of people only know Pocket as “that annoying thing that shows me sponsored articles when I launch Firefox.” These days I’m never sure how much they’re using my bookmarking to train that engine.
And while self-reinforcing algorithms geared toward engagement may be good for the dopamine hits (and a convienient channel to add sponsored articles), it’s not too helpful in the long run.
I finally gave Wallabag a try. It’s not as polished, but I feel more confident about what it’s doing with my data, and if I really want to, I can host my own server. Plus Wallabag still works on my Poke3 e-reader. I haven’t been able to get Pocket to log in on it since it stopped syncing and I reinstalled the app.
Speech Oddities
For a while I used the text-to-speech feature to listen to articles in the car while driving to and from work. Even in the mid-2010s the voice was fairly decent, despite the usual flat tones and lack of natural rhythms.
There were a few oddities, though:
- # is always read as “hash.” This makes it really odd for comics articles, which frequently talk about issue numbers. “Batman Hash 123” just sounds wrong.
- Italics are…always…emphasis, and presented by…pausing…rather than changing tone. This makes it…awkward…for anything involving lots of titles.
- It parses words, rather than using a dictionary, and can’t always figure out whether initials should be read individually or pronounced as a word. This usually works fine, but occasionally leads to phrases like “tah-kay-down notice,” (takedown) “link-uh-din” (who knew LinkedIn rhymed with Vicodin?) or “pohs terminal” (POS as in Point-Of-Sale) On the other hand, it figured out “I-triple-E,” so I imagine it’s got a dictionary for special cases.
They’ve probably been fixed by now. Probably.