Pocket (service)
service for saving web pages and other online media for later consumption
Pocket, formerly known as Read It Later, was a social bookmarking service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks, first released in 2007. Mozilla, the developer of Pocket, announced in May 2025 that it was discontinuing the service and would shut it down in July of that year.
History
Pocket was introduced in August 2007 as a Mozilla Firefox browser extension named Read It Later by Nathan (Nate) Weiner. Once his product was used by millions of people, he moved his office to Silicon Valley and four other people joined the Read It Later team. Weiner's intention was for the application to be like a TiVo directory for web content and to give users access to that content on any device.
Read It Later obtained venture capital investments of US$2.5 million in 2011 and $5.0 million in 2012. The 2011 funding came from Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures, Google Ventures, Founder Collective and unnamed angel investors. The company rejected an acquisition offer by Evernote after showing concerns that Evernote intended to shut down the Read It Later service and amalgamate its functionality into Evernote's main service.
Initially, the Read It Later app was available in a free version and a paid version that included additional features. After the rebranding to Pocket, all paid features were made available in a free and advertisement-free app.
The public source identifies “Pocket (service)” as service for saving web pages and other online media for later consumption. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pocket, service and saving.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3916680. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2025, 2011 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pocket (service)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.