Mozilla is shutting down Pocket. It marks one more failed social bookmarking site in a long line of similar applications that seem to have entirely wasted their potential.
I'm sure that the problem of Pocket didn't have much to do with the people who worked there. I'm sure they had ideas and things they wanted to do but couldn't. This isn't blaming them, or insulting them. I'm just alive with the ideas of what I would do if I was in charge of something like Pocket.
I think they should give it to me, because there's so much I'd do with it. Social bookmarking is such a cool idea that no one does anything with over and over again. Let's drop a quick list of some ideas, right off the top of my head:
1. Make it a useful archiving tool.
Almost every one of these social bookmarking sites has tried to make clean copies of the text of what you bookmark available to you offline. It never works perfectly (sometimes it doesn't work at all).
But look at Web Recorder! It's perfectly possible for your browser to generate local full web archival copies (WARCs) of the page you are looking at, with everything on it. Sure it would capture ads too, but who cares, better that than half a story. Take the WARC files, back them up, and send them to the user's devices. Make them viewable through a web viewer like Web Recorder does. Sync them through WebRTC to avoid putting your sever in the middle. Storage is cheap, network is cheap. Let people walk around with as much of the web as they can hold in their pocket. Let them share it.
Ink deals with publishers that allow Pocket to crawl and generate WARCs to share. Let them include ads and provide reporting back to the publisher.
2. Build Social Features for real
Why is every social bookmarker begin and end its features with 'here is a stream of what everyone you read has bookmarked'?
This is the least interesting aspect of a bookmarking social network. Social networking should connect me with people who read the same sites and bylines that I do. I want to see which of my friends also read the article I read. I want to be able to distinguish between bookmarked by someone and read by them. I want to have read-offs and leaderboards. I want to see what other people tagged the article I'm reading with, what the most frequently highlighted paragraphs were and more. I want to click on a user's profile and scan playlists of reading built based on what they tagged. I want everything Google Reader, Goodreads and Kindle has. Oh and I want to share WARC files I generate with others.
3. Social Decentralization
Let's knock the guardrails off. This should work on either ATProto or ActivityPub. We should be able to join the wider social web via a common protocol.
4. Showcase specific articles, not just feeds of everything
Feeds of everything are boring, especially since most social bookmarking users are voracious readers. Let me pin showcases of the best articles I read this week, month and year to my profile page. Shit... let me have a profile page!
5. Bylines are available in the metadata of almost every page and they should be the stars of social reading platforms.
When we read books it is understood that we likely want to read books by the same author later. Amazon and Goodreads understand this and build connections and recommendations on this basis.
Why does every social bookmarking site pretend that web content has no authors? This is an insane way to work a site about reading. Not only are authors important, but an active social reading site can proactively use its capabilities to help a reader find an author regardless of where they publish. Very useful because many bylines do not stay in one place!
I don't understand why no one has ever done this extremely useful thing. Especially because it would be even more useful when the system starts surfacing authors you read often without even realizing it.
Any recommendation system worth its salt can then dig up similar authors and make even better recommendations.
6. Treat bylines and article tags like LastFM or Spotify genres
Every tag, which should include article bylines and publishing URLs, should be an opportunity to make better recommendations and give you the opportunity to read deeper into a topic, author, site, or intersection of all three.
Where this is successful it would generate incredibly useful information for writers and publishers. Any site with a self preservation instinct would use this data for recruiting and to understand where it's readers want deeper coverage but are missing it on the publisher site they started on.
7. Subscription and article sharing is available on many sites. All of those sites are desperate for more money and users. Cut deals.
So far only Substack seems to have managed a "X shared access with you to this one article" as a semi-social-style event. Allow users to share subscriptions and paywall bypass codes with their followers in a more proactive style to give them to people who actually want to read that writing or publisher. Partner with publishers to make sure it works.
8. Get readers access, Scroll-style.
Every few years someone claims they are going to be the Spotify of news. But so far we've got MSN (terrible UX) and Apple News (ugh... Apple). Both of these treat all content as a basically identically sourced pool of content that they scan for vague similarities.
With tag and byline insights and the data from how people read across the network a social bookmarking site can deliver better recommendations that will encourage publishers to allow more proactive paywall/subscription bypass because users are more likely to engage and convert to long term subscribers.
Enable subscriptions through Scroll-style partial subscription flows that allow users to pay in a single sum that can be split for access across a number of publishers. Use access tokens with publishers plus WARC files to serve these partial subscribers with paywall free content they pay publishers for.
9. Star editors
People read people. Every social bookmarking site forgets this. Take the most popular authors and invite them to run reading playlists for a week or a month. Let them build best-of reading lists. Be human and be for humans.
10. Let people share links with a comment
All I want is to write a comment in the context of my social bookmarking tool, share it with others in the network, and then post it with that comment as the post text to all my social networks. Why is this not possible?
11. Let people use highlights to generate pullquotes that make for easy and fun sharing and blogging.
This is basically the Kindle feature but with the comment part more prominent. Let people share the important part of the article through posting and then let readers see where other people have designated important parts of the article.
12. Incredibly strong contextual data and reading playlists will make ad revenue.
Just sell ads. Apple does it. MSN does it. Just sell ads and use superior knowledge of contextual adjacency to make for a better venue for buyers. Well marked native ads would be especially worthwhile here. It made millions for Reddit, why not for Pocket?
13. Make reading topics for a single user into embeddable and sharable playlists
There should be an embed Pocket's users can grab for their own sites that shows all their favorite stories about X or by Y.
14. Share suggestions to power other sites recommendation blocks. Both as a paid product and as an ad supported one.
The web is full of chumboxes. A recommendation engine based on what people actually read can feed users into Pocket's (hopefully) ad-supported system which means Pocket can provide recommendation boxes that funnel users into a profitable product, serve the hosting page, and make better recommendations for in-site articles of interest than any lone operator could. And they wouldn't be filled exclusively with shit because you'd only allow ad buyers to sponsor articles that readers have actually read on the system.
15. Be incredibly supportive of writers
Most social bookmarking sites either ignore writers or see them and their publishers adversarially.
Social bookmarking should be about celebrating writers, calling out the most bookmarked writers, and highlighting the bylines that users love to read.
16. Make reading articles an event
I already have seen Twitch streams of people reading news articles. This is a thing. A social bookmarking tool should give tools to enhance that experience. Timers, streaks and UX fireworks. Make it easy to follow along with links that leverage Websockets to allow people to read along and pop out to the piece of content on their own. Use this feature to capture sign-ups for Pocket's service for people who want to get the full set of features.
If Pocket makes reading into an event and Pocket as a platform is the ringmaster, it is easy to see how opportunities emerge to get people into the metaphorical tent.
17. Make raising money for standalone bloggers or non-profit publishers part of your platform
Once Pocket has reading streaks up and running, a really obvious opportunity presents itself: fundraisers. At this point streaming for charities has become a norm. But most authors, not to mention non-profit publishers, are charities in and of themselves. Partner with them or giving tools from existing platforms to make it easy for users to raise funds for their favorite writers and publishers.
18. Be privacy-forward, but unabashedly ad funded.
The way we can get access to the vast wealth of good writing across the internet is ad funded. We can support subscriptions of all sorts too. But the vast tressure of the web is its freely accessible well-written, well-researched content. That's going away all the time because of complexities of the ad tech ecosystem. With the ability to join contextually related content from across the web a reinvigorated Pocket could find a stable state with advertising that worked and was open to a wider variety of units and ad types. I too wish we could get rid of ads, but everyone involved needs to get paid and we want a stable business so this has to be part of it.
19. Make exporting and importing easy. Everyone takes their data with them easily and can easily pull data in from other similar platforms, or even a list of URLs or a Bookmarks folder.
All over the web people bookmark. They may not even think of it that way. Make it easy for people to pull and push lists of bookmarks with Pocket. Embrace decentralization and the social web.
20. It should be fun.
Keep it fun, keep it friendly. This can and should be a social bookmarking tool. Delicious was only the beginning, but we can do so much more.