![]() Quite frankly I’m not sure the world needed another content sharing platform, and I certainly wasn’t craving another place to follow people. To me, a read-it-later service is more about enjoying content and less about sharing it. I should say that I don’t know how I feel about it yet. ![]() It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s well executed. The beta recently introduced a profile system, which takes the simple stream idea of Instapaper and transforms it into a robust platform for content sharing, complete with excerpts and commentary. The biggest change to Pocket has been a radical re-thinking of its sharing and recommendation system. This public program is a helpful way for the designers and developers to experiment with changes on a large scale without disrupting the mainstream users. Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Pocket beta. Instapaper is for reading, for annotating, for researching, and for thinking. There’s still no Mac app, there’s still no tagging, and that still doesn’t bother me. They’re a collection of thoughtful refinements that improve the way people actually use Instapaper. Taken together, these improvements aren’t a radical rethinking of the product. The latter is a huge upgrade from last year’s experience and is now much more reliable about correctly interpreting article content, especially for multi-page setups. This is proven to help you get through articles faster, and while I don’t use it, I know it’s a popular approach.īehind the scenes, we’ve also seen improvements to sync speed, the content ranking algorithm, the mobile apps, the browser extension, and the parsing engine. In the service of reading, Instapaper also introduced a Speed Reading feature that displays one word at a time at the pace of your choosing. My comment in the tweet helps, but ultimately there’s nothing like an actual passage from the text to give people a sense of whether or not they’d like to read what I’m linking to. ![]() ![]() There’s an important accessibility concern here, but the reality is that they’re terrific for engagement and help contextualize my sharing of a link. ![]() One of the ways of publicly sharing a highlight is the increasingly popular “tweetshot”, which is an image of the passage that gets attached to your tweet. With iOS 9’s new Notes app, I can read through an article, taking notes all the while, and then export all my annotations for later use in an article. Those notes can then be shared publicly, or they can serve as a private note to self that helps me remember what my thought process was when I highlighted a passage. The Kindle got me used to highlighting important passages to revisit later, and Instapaper has taken this system to its logical next stage, which is providing a built-in notes system so that I can not only highlight an important passage, but also annotate it. I’ve been happy to see Instapaper double down on their core competency: providing the best experience for those who want to explore saved content. Over the past year, both products have made some significant improvements, and while they reinforce my initial conclusions, they also indicate some interesting shifts in the landscape of content saving. Almost a year ago, I wrote about how Pocket and Instapaper have fundamentally different approaches to saving and revisiting content. ![]()
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