Arment said project had outgrown his ability to keep it up-to-date

Popular Mac punditry figure, developer and publisher Marco Arment has announced that he has sold a majority share of his web-article saving and syncing app Instapaper to Digg owners Betaworks. Under the deal, Betaworks will "take over the operations, expand its staff and develop it further," says Arment, while he will continue advising the project "indefinitely." He admitted in the blog post that he had "had trouble" keeping up with the needs of the service for the past year, while rivals such as Pocket and Readability could devote more resources.

"Instapaper is much bigger today than I could have predicted in 2008, and it has simply grown far beyond what one person can do," Arment wrote. He added that "after more than five years, I'd like an opportunity to try other apps and creative projects." Arment said he didn't want to sell it to a big company that would just fold it into a bigger project or shut it down after six months (an oblique but likely reference to Google and their recent closure announcements of recently-acquired properties like Snapseed for Mac).

He said he realized which company should take on the project, based on his long-standing acquaintance of the Betaworks staff, which Arment said had "great engineering talent, great product direction, and plenty of experience running services at Instapaper's scale." Terms of the acquisition were not mentioned, but Betaworks added in a short post on its own website about the deal "we're thrilled." All services and apps are expected to continue as normal for the foreseeable future.

by MacNN Staff