Why You Should Love Instapaper.

Posted on 04. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Mobile, Trends

There are services and products that radically change our experience. Google. RSS. Twitter. The Iphone. The Kindle. FourSquare… But there’s also another category of less hyped, but not less relevant services, that help make our lives better. Think Dropbox or Evernote. Instapaper is one of these wonders.

What is it? The idea is simple: we all find ourselves in a situation where we really want to read something, but we don’t have the time. Some of us will keep 100 tabs open, in the hope to find the time later, others will bookmark it. Either way, that post is gone. Chances are you won’t read it.

Instapaper is that “Read Later” in your life. With a simple click on a bookmarklet, you can save in one central place all the items that you want to Read Later. The web interface is clean and simple, and offers additional features to help you stay organized (archive and folders), share your reads, and discover what’s hot among other Instapaper readers.

But that’s not all.

-Integration with Google Reader. Besides using Instapaper through the bookmarklet, you can also save items directly from your Google Reader, by using the function Send To. (thanks to @tamar and @scepticgeek for helping me discover this!).

-Iphone App. You can access your Instapaper items from an Iphone app which will transform your iPhone in a mini-reading tablet. There are two versions, a free and a premium one. The free version will save up to 15 items. The premium one, Instapaper Pro, which costs only $4.99, can store up to 250 items and downloads articles in the background, so any time you have it open, it’s updating the list of stories for you to read. Other premium features include the option to share your articles with the Instapaper community and read popular articles that have been shared by others. (If you’re a Tweetie 2 user, you can save posts directly to Instapaper!).

-Kindle/E-reader “Integration”. Until last week, you could link your Instapaper to your Kindle account and it would synch-up daily or weekly. But you had to pay $0.15 for each of the emails sent and it turned out that the system was unreliable. Instead of over-the-air download, now you can use a USB key, where the 20 more recent Instapaper saved articles will be transfered as Kindle-compatible .mobi file. Instapaper also supports ePub downloads, the format that many other popular e-readers use (like Sony Readers).

Instapaper is the work of Tumblr lead developer Marco Arment and was recently named by O’Reilly as one of the top 10 Iphone Apps. No surprise there!

Do you use it? Do you like it?