Rian van der Merwe:
My loyalty comes from the fact that I’m unable to separate Instapaper from its creator, Marco Arment.
And it works really well.
Loyalty and Instapaper
Rian van der Merwe:
My loyalty comes from the fact that I’m unable to separate Instapaper from its creator, Marco Arment.
And it works really well.
Agreed, even though I don’t know him I associate Instapaper with Marco and would rather support his product as a result. I don’t have any idea who’s name I would associate with Read It Later or Readability.
Same here. I used to use the free version of Instapaper and always used to make note of Marco’s bullet points for upgrading to the paid version.
Although the added features were worth it, it was the fact that he was one developer offering a service I genuinely found useful and enjoyable that eventually sealed the deal.
There is something about the addition of a human element to a product that fosters loyalty. Instapaper is a great product in and of itself, but that is precisely because of Marco’s continual devotion to its user experience.
The best way I know how to show my respect for what he’s done is to continue using Instapaper. That and because it’s still the best experience for reading things later.
I’m one of the people that recently moved to Readability from Instapaper. Like the author of this post, I too associate Instapaper with Marco as a person, and my opinion of both is really high. In the end it obviously wasn’t high enough to lock me in, but I know that loyalty feeling. Hell, that’s how I feel about Jim and Peter. (MacCentral was by far the most meaningful online community I ever joined) Anyway, I decided to move to Readability because their subscription service really resonates with me. Then when I started reading all these posts insinuating Readability’s business model is shady and/or immoral I really got sucked in. Annoyed me enough to write my own crappy blog post on the subject. I seriously feel bad for the guys at Readability. When someone as high-profile as Gruber craps on your service that does real damage. In my case, this negativity actually drove me to want to support Readability more. I don’t feel like I’m betraying Marco because I already bought his app. If he releases something else I’ll probably buy it just to show my support. I just feel motivated to support someone else too.
It’s interesting because I dislike Marco a good amount, but I really do like Instapaper.
And yet, that’s precisely why I won’t even look at Instapaper.
I dislike Steve Ballmer, professionally, a great deal, yet, he’s not the end all and be all of Microsoft, so I’ve little issue with my preference for Outlook 2011, even though Ballmer’s a tool, because he’s got fuck all to really do with Outlook, any more than Steve Jobs has fuck all to do with AppleScript.
But when you cannot separate a person from the product, that personal opinion cuts the other way.