Instapaper, Delicious and thinking about tools

Posted by Steve Hull on Tuesday 17 August 2010 at 11:01am
Tags: usability | workflow |

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There’s a very simple service available on the Internet called Instapaper. It works like this: you’re surfing the web and come across something you want to read but you don’t have time. You click a “Read Later” button on your browser and the URL is stored on a list on your Instapaper account. Later, on any device which has web access, you can log into your Instapaper account and click on the link you stored earlier and read away.

Now this isn’t a big thing and it’s not a new thing. It would be quite easy to, for example, save a link in Delicious and give it a “Read Later” tag. You could then log into Delicious wherever you are and type in Read Later into the search box and bring up an identical list. So what’s the difference?

Two things: first of all, the Instapaper approach is a one-click system. You don’t have to think at all, just hit the button. But the second thing is perhaps even more important, and that’s this: the advantage Instapaper has over Delicious is that it isn’t Delicious. It’s something different, and the task you do with it is a different task.

In the interface to the web that we construct in our minds and our browsers, we assign different roles to different tools. For many of us, Delicious is the tool we use to organise the subset of the web that we interact with or intend to interact with over a longer period of time. Filing a URL away so we can look at it later and then probably discard it is a different action. We could (and some of us no doubt do) use Delicious for this action as well, particularly as it’s so similar to the actions we already use Delicious for. But having a different tool underscores the fact that we are trying to do something different; it provides a structure for our thinking about our web content. We may look at a site and say to ourselves, “Is this a site to add to Delicious or should I just Instapaper it?” We may bring up a page we’ve stored on Instapaper and, after reading it, decide whether or not it warrants adding to our Delicious database.

It seems to me that the people at Instapaper have identified an activity that isn’t addressed by Delicious. It could be – there’s enough space at the top of the Delicious sidebar to add a “Read Later” button – but until it is, or until someone comes up with a simpler way of addressing that need, there’ll be a place for Instapaper.

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