Digg founder Kevin Rose offers to buy Pocket from Mozilla

Digg, the Web 2.0-era hyperlink aggregator that’s now being given a second chance at life, is open to purchasing Mozilla’s read-it-later app, Pocket.

On Thursday, Mozilla announced it would shut down Pocket on July 8, saying that the way in which individuals use the net has advanced, and it wanted to give attention to new areas of improvement. Shortly after, Kevin Rose, Digg’s authentic proprietor, now co-founder of the brand new Digg alongside Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, posted on X that his firm can be considering buying Pocket from Mozilla.

Tagging each Mozilla and Pocket on the publish, Rose wrote, “we love Pocket at @Digg, joyful to take it over and proceed to assist your customers for years to return!” The publish moreover tagged Betaworks founding associate Peter Rojas, beforehand the founding father of Gizmodo and Engadget, now SVP New Merchandise at Mozilla.

Neither Digg nor Mozilla has but to reply to a request for touch upon the information. Nevertheless, the deal could possibly be attention-grabbing if it went via, as Digg might leverage Pocket’s present consumer base to gas curiosity in its relaunch. Digg might probably even combine Pocket’s studying record with Digg, making it simpler for customers to search out and share partaking content material on to the information aggregator. This might present an preliminary pipeline for feeding information and articles into Digg whereas it labored to develop its consumer base.

Digg’s comeback has attracted consideration, because it pairs Digg’s authentic founder, Rose, with Ohanian, who helped create the longtime Digg competitor, Reddit, now an web big of its personal. Digg not too long ago introduced it has also brought on Christian Selig, the founding father of the third-party Reddit app Apollo, as an adviser. Selig’s Apollo app had been probably the greatest methods to work together with Reddit, however the firm reduce off the app’s entry by raising its API pricing to the purpose that it could have put Selig out of enterprise.

Digg isn’t the one one to have gone after Pocket. Medium CEO Tony Stubbleine says he additionally explored shopping for Pocket in 2023, however by no means heard from Mozilla earlier than it introduced it was shutting the app down.

“Undecided what Mozilla is doing, however it’s form of infuriating,” Stubbleine instructed TechCrunch. “The Pocket software program is simple to rebuild, however a few of the infrastructure and integrations across the internet can be onerous to interchange. So I’m positive that somebody would have taken it on.”

Up to date after publication with remark from Stubbleine.

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