The Instapaper Paradigm

Instapaper is a bookmarking service that lets you quickly save web pages you want to read later. You might find this useful if you subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds, or follow lots of news sites on Twitter. I do both, and Instapaper has made me approximately a million times more efficient sifting through the information overload of RSS feeds and Twitter.

To use Instapaper, you go to the web site and set up an account. It needs an email address — that’ll be your login name — and you can choose to add a password if you want. Add a bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks, and then whenever you come across an article you want to read later, just click the bookmarklet. The article is magically saved to your Instapaper account. So the next time you have a few minutes to catch up on reading, go to Instapaper.com and read your stored up articles.

There are a few other ways to get articles into Instapaper. Some RSS readers, like Google Reader, have an option to save individual articles to Instapaper. Also, some iPhone Twitter apps (Echofon Pro, for example), have Instapaper integration. So you can spend a quick few minutes scanning and saving articles you want to read later, then go to Instapaper to read them when you have more time.

And here’s where the magic really happens. There is an Instapaper iPhone app, which parses the text from the article, and presents them for easy reading on the iPhone. Actually, there are two apps. The free version is fairly robust, but only shows you 10 of your saved articles. It’s also ad-supported (the guy’s gotta pay the bills somehow). The pay version is $5, and honestly, it’s one of the best bargains in the app store. You can access all your articles, folders, and it’ll download articles in the background. Both versions allow offline reading, so you can save up a bunch of articles for a plane ride or somewhere you won’t be assured Internet access.

Instapaper has really changed the way I track and read news. It’s one of those services/apps that you don’t realize you need until you’re using it, and then you wonder how you ever managed without it. If you have an opportunity, give it a try.