InstaPaper: A Stroke of Bookmarking Brilliance

It’s not that often these days that an online service jumps out and demands to be embraced but Instapaper is a pleasant exception to the rule.

Instapaper is a simple tool that lets you “bookmark” articles, blog posts, etc. that you find interesting but want to read later. After dragging a booklet widget to your browser, you simply hit the “Read Later” button when you run across something good, and a link gets sent to your Instapaper home.

Before installing Instapaper a couple of days ago, I used two methods to handle things that I wanted to read later – I would either bookmark them in del.icio.us or save multiple tabs in Firefox. The problem with del.icio.us is I never actually went back to read any of the articles, while keeping 20 Firefox tabs open all the time is a waste of resources.

Instapaper is one of those online services that should be enthusiastically adopted because it fills a need in a simple, elegant way. Congrats to developer Marco Arment, who works at Tumblr, for this stroke of brilliance.

For more views on Instapaper, check out Paris Lemon, who calls it a “beautifully simple bookmarking tool”, while TechCrunch describes it as a “cool new service taking bookmarks back to basics”.

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