Dear Marco, Improving Instapaper

Dear Marco

Instapaper is the best product I’ve used in about 1,000 years. It allows you to queue things for reading, then read them practically anywhere you like.

I love this because it decouples you from the web. It makes everything you do asynchronous. Sort of like turning the web in to email.

I used to open up, say, hacker news and open up tabs for everything I wanted to read. Then instead I used to just hit ‘read later’ on them and read whenever I got a chance on my phone or tablet.

Now I have a slightly different system. I email instapaper a snapshot of hacker news every 12 hours at 10am/pm pacific. I figure the valley crowd are going to be at their most active about those two times.

I don’t want to read every damn HN post, so I just send myself snapshots.

Then when I have time, I open up the snapshots and hit ‘read later’ to the ones I care about. Then these are added to my queue and magically appear for me to read at some point in the future.

Suggestion 1: Have a mode for me to to just click on URLs and assume I mean ‘read later’. Holding down on a URL should open the open/read later menu.

This is enormously useful for plane flights. My instapaper usage can be very bursty. Months of adding things, then a few 9 hour plane flights to read it all.

Suggestion 2: let me pay to pre-cache links in my queue so they appear when I’m offline on a plane.

Emailing myself HN is kind of broken because the script does’t currently fully qualify local links. So ‘ask HN’ posts which are just relative URLs don’t resolve, instapaper calls them ‘instapaper-private:’ or something.

Suggestion 3: Let me pay for snapshots of certain sites, like HN or the front page of the NYT to be delivered regularly and resolve local URLs and stuff.

Isn’t this what RSS is for? Well not quite. Remember, I don’t want to read every damn post of everything. Snapshots that make it look like I checked in once a day are perfectly good enough and let me keep up to date with the rough direction of things.

Suggestion 4: Let me intelligently do something with RSS feeds in instapaper.

I’m not talking about turning instapaper in to a RSS reader, though that should be an option. Perhaps let me look at RSS feed snapshots (I only need the title and URL of each entry) like I want with web pages.

Sharing works wonderfully but as far as I can tell it only works synchronously.

The genius of instapaper is that it decouples me from the web. I want to send things to tumblr from a plane, offline. Please let me do that so I don’t have to keep things hanging around.

I don’t understand what the love button is for. If I love something I’ll post it to some social fad site.

Suggestion 5: Let me see what the popular links are.

When I look at my snapshot of hacker news, I have reams of links. I pick links based on what interests me. Use the usage data instapaper has to indicate which of the links I’m looking at are popular.

Deleting things is a super pain.

Suggestion 6: When I hit delete don’t ask me if I’m sure, and then automatically move to the next thing to read. This will save me a lot of annoyance.

Last but not least

Suggestion 7: Ship a pony with every account. A unicorn for paid accounts.

1 month ago  /  0 notes