First off, if you don’t use an RSS reader or are unfamiliar with what they are, start here. If you are feed savvy, let me tell you what I do, also feel free to share your methods in the comments. I use a weird combination of Reeder, Reading List, and Instapaper. A friend told me about Instapaper a couple of years ago, and I knew that it was tailored for my squirrel-like attention span. The jist of it is that if you see something you like online, add it to Instapaper so you can come back to it later or at least tell yourself that you’re going to come back to it later. Likewise, I’ve been hooked on Reeder since I first laid eyes on it as an iOS app, it makes Google Reader usable. Not that Google Reader is hard to use, but it is more difficult than it needs to be. Reeder beautifies it and makes it more intuitive. This is especially true now that the Mac app has come out of beta and will let you manage subscriptions right inside the app.
One of the things that I really like about Reeder is how simple it is to save something for later reading. Just swipe left in the iOS app or click the Instapaper button in the upper right corner and you’re all set, provided that you’ve entered your Instapaper credentials. This was all well and good until Apple added that little pair of glasses to their safari browser. Now, anytime that I come across anything that I want to re-visit, I can press cmnd+shift+d to store it in my Reading List. The best part is that it instantly syncs across all my devices.
Like a lot of people, I assumed that Reading List would completely eliminate the need for any of the “read later” apps or bookmarklets. The more that I use it, the more that I think otherwise. They both have their place. I use Instapaper to save things that I find in my RSS feeds, and I use Reading List to save things that I come across on my own or through links from friends, or twitter, or anywhere really that is not in my RSS feeds. As of yet, Instapaper has very little to worry about, at least from the people that use it the way that I do. No, their problem is just around the corner. I suspect that third party app companies, such as Reeder, will soon see the beauty and simplicity of Reading List and start building it into their applications. This is where apps like Read It Later, Instapaper, and Readability will start to take a hit from Apple’s native solution for a problem that many people didn’t even realize that they had.
