Introducing the Pocket Beta Channel

Play around with awesome new features from Pocket (like Recommendations!) before anyone else.

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Last month, I laid out how Pocket is building a Save Button for the Internet. That post closed with a statement on what we believe is possible when you give people the power to save and view content later:

“We want to create a platform that enables people to save and consume the content they care about most. And by doing so, we hope to make it easier to spend time with more high-quality content, no matter how noisy it gets.”

This is the kind of impact we’re committed to making, and we have a ton of amazing stuff coming down the pipeline to help you discover, capture, consume and share the stories that matter to you. Today, we’re opening up a public beta channel (available on Android, iOS, and Web) where we’ll be sharing early versions of these features over the coming months. We’d love for you to jump in, get early access, and tell us what you think!

In our first beta release, we’re starting with a simple, yet powerful new addition to Pocket: Recommendations.

Recommendations: High-Quality Content Without the Noise

It’s a noisy world out there. The channels we use to discover the stories we’re interested in — Twitter, Facebook, and a slew of news readers, etc. — are dictated by page views and favor real-time, meaning great content has a relatively short lifespan. As a result, what’s good is constantly being pushed down by what’s simply new.

What we’re missing is a channel where great content doesn’t have an expiration date. One that catches the best stories before they fly on by.

This behavior, catching the best content from the web, is what millions of Pocket users are doing all the time. Every day, people are hand-selecting the very best content from across the Web, and with over 2 billion items saved to Pocket (with millions more being added every day), Pocket ends up becoming this enormous curation machine.

As a result, more than any other app or service, Pocket has a unique, human understanding of what’s worth reading or watching on the web. And with Recommendations, we want to use this insight to help you spend time with more high-quality content, no matter how noisy it gets.

Come Explore Recommendations with Us by Joining the Pocket Beta

Recommendations live alongside your List, and will surface the top content from the billions of items saved to Pocket, based on what you already save, read, watch and share. The idea is that they’ll help you cut through the noise and make sure you don’t miss stories you’d actually want to come back to.

This is a little different for us, in that we’re experimenting publicly with super early versions of what we’re building. Getting these features right is enormously important to us, and in order for us to help connect you with the best content on the web, it means that we need your input to know what’s working and what’s not. I speak for the entire team when I say we’d be honored to have you join us. Your feedback is going to take these new features even further.

Recommendations is just one small piece of what’s coming over the next several months and I’m looking forward to working on this together!

Note: We released Recommendations to the entire Pocket platform on August 26, 2015. Check it out on Android, iOS and Web, and thanks to everyone who tested and gave feedback when this was in Beta! The Beta will continue with new features so your help is still needed!

Where to Get the Beta

Click your platform of choice below — you can join more than one!

Join the Beta: Android — iOS — Web

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P.S. If you’d like to join us in making this happen, we’re hiring! Open roles include Android Developer, iOS Developer, Front-end Developer, Communication Designer, Data Scientist, and Product Manager. Check out the Pocket Jobs page for more info.