The Company That's Buying Up All the Key Pieces of the Online-News Ecosystem

Betaworks announced it had acquired the first read-it-later service, Instapaper, from its founder and developer, Marco Arment. With Instapaper's acquisition, Betaworks stuck a hand in another part of the hypertext ecosystem.

• Any link in any tweet from a news organization was probably shortened to something cute and custom -- and the market leader there is Bit.ly, owned by Betaworks.
• Even before that, the publication might use a tool to figure out when it should post stories on Twitter -- a tool sold by a company like Social Flow, which is owned by Betaworks.
• Littorally-proximate journalists will likely use a real-time analytics dashboard -- like Chartbeat, a Betaworks product.
• The leading social news aggregator of the moment is Digg, which--yes--Betaworks purchased and remade last summer.
• And when someone saves a story for later, they're likely to use the oldest product in that space, the product which has advertised on the Howard Stern Show and given itself away as Starbucks's free app of the week: Instapaper.