Nate Weiner: What’s in My Pocket
Today we’re introducing a new series called What’s in My Pocket, in which we spotlight Pocket users who share their reading and watching habits with the world. We’re kicking it off with the person who started it all, Pocket founder Nate Weiner (@NateWeiner).
Name: Nate Weiner, Founder, Pocket
Location: San Francisco
First started using Pocket: 2007
What’s in Nate’s Pocket:
In the five years since he first created Pocket (formerly Read It Later), Nate has saved more than 9,800 items, and he’s read roughly 2.3 million words. Nate’s weekly “open rate”—his weekly percentage of items “opened” in Pocket compared to “saved”—is 72%.
When he saves content in Pocket:
“Every waking hour. [Laughs.] If I’m in bed and just waking up, I’m checking my phone and saving stuff there. At work, I’m saving stuff there. On the subway home, I’m saving stuff from Twitter.”
Where he saves:
Nate saves most of his content from a Twitter client (47% of items come from there), followed by his Firefox Extension (38%). (Incidentally, Pocket was first created as a Firefox Extension.)
When he comes back to his saved items:
“I do most of my reading on the [San Francisco] Muni in the morning, and most of the time at night I’m watching videos—on the Pocket site or on a tablet. I do a lot of my video consumption while I’m eating lunch or dinner, on a desktop computer.”
On watching video in Pocket:
“I speed-eat, and usually there’s one video I’ve saved that’s like 10 minutes, so I can go through it. Video is a hands-off thing, so it’s nice for those moments. A lot of the video content I’m saving is from @PocketHits, Vimeo Staff Picks and time-lapse photography from the Dynamic Perception guys. There’s longer stuff, too, like TED Talks. I’d bet 90 percent of my video consumption happens after 6 pm.”
Total number of unique sites saved in Nate’s Pocket: 282
Popular sites in Nate’s Pocket:
YouTube
Vimeo
TheNextWeb
The Verge
The New York Times
Brain Pickings
Fortune
The Atlantic
Reddit
GigaOm
What’s the last thing he saved?
“I just saved a video from PetaPixel called ‘A Simple Explanation of F-Stop Numbers’ that Justin [Pocket’s Community Manager] had shared on Twitter.”
What’s the last thing he came back to?
“The last article I read was The Verge’s feature ‘Apple v.s Samsung: inside a jury’s nightmare.’ ”
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