It's human nature to want to be first, especially when the stakes are high, such as winning a big race or walking on the Moon. But milestones are also important for software developers, especially when competitors continue to claim otherwise.

Instapaper creator Marco Arment posted a blog Thursday entitled "The First Read-Later Service" which examines the timeline between his service launching in January, 2008 and competitor Pocket (formerly Read It Later) doing the same months later.

Arment's frustration stems from Pocket's continued insistence that they were the first kind of "read later" service to allow users to save web articles for later reading. Although they debuted as a Firefox extension in November, 2007 -- a mere two months prior to Instapaper blasting onto the scene -- Arment notes the solution had "no web service, no sync and no support for other browsers."

The lack of multiple browser and device support, sync, text extraction and formatting and offline saving is exactly why Arment feels that Pocket's claims are "extremely misleading, or simply false, to say that Read It Later/Pocket was 'the first save-for-later service'."

Pocket debuted in October, 2008 as Read It Later, complete with web sync, bookmarklets for additional browsers and offline saving -- all features Instapaper had rolled out much earlier that year

"For Pocket to repeatedly state the opposite -- that they were the first service like this, and that Instapaper followed their lead -- is over the line, and I won’t sit here quietly and let that go unchallenged," Arment concludes.

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