The rationale is such apps are still limited to early adopters. No need to be a certified ergonomist to guess which one will be used the most:įor good measure, let's say Apple is not the last entity to add features that kill value by removing ads below the same NYT web page in normal and "Reader" mode:įor now, publishers don't seem to care much about this type of value hijacking. See screenshots from the iPhone Instapaper app below:Īs for the Read it Later application, it proposes (below) a web view and a reformatted text-view. But when it comes to apps for smartphones or mobiles, these services become value killers: their content is displayed in the apps without advertising. From their respective sites, these companies play a referrer role as they send traffic back to the original publishers.
To the first question, the answer is yes and no. What kind of business models can the aggregators hope for?
Just as important, Read Later and Read It Later rely on hundreds of third party applications that use their APIs (a piece of code that allows apps to talk to each other). This system combines the best of Twitter (gathering a community that selects relevant contents) with the final responsibility of human editors. They're all built on the same idea: a self-organised community of thousands of people (see graph below) who pick up articles they like and put them on Twitter (and also on Facebook and Tumblr) the feeds are then re-aggregated and curated by the sites' editors. There are two other such sites I use less often: The Browser and Give Me Something to Read. Instapaper has its own Browse section and my two favourites are Longreads and Longform. My second source of good stories is the Editor's Pick on three long-form curation sites. In doing so, I have recreated my own serendipitous environment as I open the app, I always find something interesting I'd put aside a couple of weeks earlier. Unsurprisingly, topics centre around business stories, medias, tech but they also extend to neurosciences, and in-depth profiles of creative people in a wide range of fields.
The stories I don't have time to read at work are now available on my two nomad devices for my daily commute, my chronic insomnia, after-dinner relaxation or long flights. Then, I loaded the Instapaper app on my iPhone and my iPad, it works just fine. I just got it this weekend and haven't had much time to use it yet.) (There is another service/app of the same kind called Read it Later. This causes the piece to be stored in the cloud.