i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Do you know read-it-later applications? If you don’t, you have to try it. With it, “One reading list, everywhere you are” (from Read it Later). Read It Later and Instapaper are the most used applications. They

There are many reasons to use them.

• Procrastination:
• Limitation of device: e.g. flash in Mobile device
• For future reference: e.g.. for blog posting
• For future reading: offline or with mobile device during commuting
• Any other reasons?

They provide not only plugins for different platform, applications and devices but also APIs - so you can use the services with other application like many twitter clients.

Here are three questions:

• more tools, more information overload?
• general purpose solution vs. specific application
• personal information management + social features?

First of all, using more ‘productive solutions’ might make more information more information overload. Here is a quote from Marco Arment, the founder of Instapaper. What do you think about it?

I don’t want Instapaper to just be another bucket for the thousands of items that you have deal with and that you feel obligated and burdened by. That’s the last thing I want. So what I really want to do is give people tools to help them manage information overload [so] that it’s not a burden, that relieves them of stress rather than adding to it. (at the interview)

Second, general purpose PIM(Personal Information Management) softwares can handle the needs, and specific purpose application are becoming having more features - then what is the difference? For example, you can do read-it-later with Evernote. There might be several reasons for using special purpose applications, such as more specialized interface, features and experience by specialized application.

• Instapaper plans to provide long-term archive - becoming more like personal information management system.

Third, what do you think about adding social features on PIM?

• Instapaper website shows editor’s picks and they even have different websites, Give Me Something To Read .
• Digest of Read It Later provides sharing features.

One thing I do want to do is have better export support for services that will help you with long-time archival. Things like Evernote, Delicious and Pinboard. So I definitely want to add those. I wouldn’t really classify any of those, except maybe Delicious, as social though. And Delicious, while it is technically social, I don’t think it’s really used like that as much anymore - if it ever was. So I want to add features that help people with their own organization. (at the interview)