Unfortunately, the ability to quickly tap a button to add something to your reading list was so easy - perhaps too easy - that users ended up with long, unwieldy lists of saved content. Now ReadItLater is introducing a new Digest feature which helps you get caught up by automatically sorting and organizing articles for you.

ReadItLater's creator Nate Weiner calls the new Digest "Read It Later with a brain." Instead of being presented with a simple list of headlines as you were before, the Digest organizes all your articles and groups them into topics.

Its layout is somewhat reminiscent of Feedly, the popular start page made up of your Google Reader RSS feeds and Twitter posts. Like Feedly, which organizes topics by Google Reader folder names and tags, the Digest also employs a categorization system of sorts. The difference is, in ReadItLater's case, that filtering and organization is performed automatically with no extra effort required on your part.

Articles you saved about the latest gadgets would end up in one section, for example, and those about politics would end up in another. Even if you're typically focused on just one topic - like, let's say technology - the Digest is able to break down those similar articles by sub-category.

Case in point - my digest. All the articles are focused on tech but are broken up into categories like "mobile," "Apple," "business," and "advertising." The sorting algorithm slips up a little though and creates one page of "Technology" articles - well, that would be all of them, wouldn't it? It also oddly categorizes a CNet article about Google Buzz's privacy issues under "advertising." Still, even with these small misfires, this new organized homepage - like a personal TechMeme of saved content, makes it much easier to know where to begin attacking your long list of unread items.

Interacting with Articles and other Features

When you click on an item to read it, it pops up in a separate overlay window on the screen. Options at the top let you see "more" or "less" of the article or you can click "original" to be redirected to the website where the article was first posted. And as before, you clear an item off the list by clicking the check mark.

Other Digest features include an "edit topics" option that lets you create your own categories and a sharing feature that allows you publicize your digest for others to read.

Future Plans: ReadItLater for iPad and Premium Services

For now, the Digest is free for all beta testers on a first-come, first-serve basis. However, in a few weeks, the new Digest option will transform into a subscription-based premium service. Those who use ReadItLater's free service will be presented with just a simple list of headlines as before while the Digest will only be available to subscribers. Pricing for the service will be announced in the coming weeks.

Weiner says this represents "a very good taste of what to expect from ReadItLater on the iPad," hinting at the service's future offering for users of Apple's highly anticipated slate computer.

Those interested in beta testing the Digest feature can sign up at http://readitlaterlist.com/digest to try the new service for themselves.

But the bigger news from this company is the release of an API that will allow anyone to build their own Read It Later applications - and not just for mobile, but for any platform.

The Read It Later application on the iPhone, available in both a free and paid version, lets you mark articles you're reading in Safari using a customized bookmarklet. Originally, the installation of this bookmarklet was a bit of a challenge as you first have to save a link then edit it, but thanks to iPhone OS 3.0's introduction of copy-and-paste, the process is much simpler.

With the update to Read It Later version 1.3, iPhone users will have access to a number of new features. Although each one is a minor tweak or upgrade, when combined, the overall experience of using the application is greatly improved.

1) Better Access to Articles: The first of the many changes includes support for multi-page articles. These articles will be detected by the application and combined into offline web and text modes. Also supported are articles that sit behind a paywall or are password-protected in some way - such as those on the Wall Street Journal's site, for example. Now Read It Later can store that content by caching your login credentials so you don't have to enter them again when the app needs to download that content. And while you're reading these saved articles, a new scroll bar makes it easier to navigate.

2) Reading List Improvements: To keep track of your reading list, the new app introduces a "Currently Reading" section where your list of "to-read" articles are tracked. It even remembers your position in every article you're reading! When you finish an article, it's moved to the newly created archive (the "Recently Read" section).

3) More Sharing, Rotation Lock (Pro Users Only): For users of the Pro (paid) version, you'll now be able to share articles to other iPhone Twitter applications like Twitterlator, TwitterFon, and Tweetie. Also added is Evernote, which complements the current list of sharing methods that already included Facebook, Delicious, and email.

Another new feature for Pro users is the ability to lock the rotation of the phone so that it stays put in the viewing mode you want (portrait or landscape) - a feature we wish the iPhone itself would include, to be honest!

The Read It Later API

As developer Nate Weiner explains on his blog, "as a solo developer, it's just not possible for me to develop for every mobile device and browser." That's why he decided to open up his API so others could build apps that do everything his does including tagging, syncing, account management, and more.

Hopefully, this new openness will encourage other developers to step in and help build applications for Palm, Android, Blackberry, and Chrome or implement the good features he hears suggested to him on a regular basis.

There's a good chance that developers will jump on this opportunity - and not just because Read It Later already has a user base of 1 million that grows by 5000 new users per day - that's just one incentive. The other is that API is open for both free and commercial applications, meaning the first (or best) apps developed for new platforms can actually earn money for their creators, just as Read It Later has done for Nate on the iPhone.

To access the API, sign up for an API key here.

For the new iPhone applications, you can download Read It Later Free here or Pro here ($2.99).

If you've been looking for a great resource for finding bookmarklets, you're going to love the new site at bmlet.com, an online directory and search engine just for bookmarklets.

If you'd rather browse through the listings, you can do so from the "browse" link at the top of the page, but here your only options are sorting them by date or relevance. That's not all that useful, to be honest. (And how are they determining relevance, we wonder?) An alphabetical listing or listing them by category would be a lot more helpful. In fact, it's almost not worth bothering with the browse option at all.

That's really not a big deal, though, since the search engine works just fine. However, it looks like the site still has room to grow - we noticed that they were missing a few of our favorites. For example, we love the "share in Google Reader" bookmarklet, but a search for Google Reader only delivered two results: view feed source and note to Reader. Oh well. (You can see a list of great bookmarklets we're using here). But on the other hand, a search for Twitter left us with so many options it was hard to even choose a favorite.

If, like us, you notice any missing bookmarklets on the site, you don't have to wait for them to add them to their directory - you can just add them yourself. After creating an account, you can click the add bookmarklet link and fill in the title, description, javascript, source link, and tags for the bookmarklet you want to share. Hit "submit" and you're done.

Be warned though - it's very easy to lose track of time when delving into this resource. Instead of giving it a quick once-over, I found myself lost in there for over half an hour today. But what better way to spend a Friday, right?

Because the iPhone doesn't allow users to easily copy and paste a code snippet into a bookmark (yet), installing the bookmarklet is a bit complicated, but the company provides a good set of instructions, and installing the bookmarklet shouldn't take more than a minute.

Once you have installed the bookmarklet, you just have to open up your bookmarks folder, click the Read It Later bookmark, and the page will be saved for you. Because your data is saved on the company's server, you can easily sync bookmarks from multiple devices.

In the app itself, you can then read your bookmarked stories in the built-in browser at your leisure. You can also sort your reading list by date, title, or site.

Read It Later's most important feature, however, is that it caches the content of your saved Web pages and lets you read it offline. Thanks to this, you can catch up on some of your reading while on a plane, for example.

Pro Version

The paid version, which costs $2.99 (iTunes link), adds a number of great features to the app, including a 'Tap To Save' bookmarklet that allows you to save any link on a given page (see this video for how it works), a full-screen reader that hides the Read It Later bookmarks, the ability to share links on various social bookmarking services, and an unread count on the apps icon on the iPhone's home screen.

Verdict

Read It Later's closest competitor is probably Instapaper, which also offers a free and pro version (at $9.99). Both apps are very similar, and Instapaper has a dedicated following that swears by the product. We like both apps, and would recommend that you try the free version of both Read it Later and Instapaper to see which one works best for you. For us, Read It Later's 'Tap to Save' bookmarklet is a killer feature in the pro version, but not everybody will really need this.

Naming aside, what's interesting about this search tool is that it's not a destination site you have to remember to visit. Instead, you activate your searches by just clicking on an Ambiently bookmarklet to launch a page of related links.

Ambiently is the kind of tool that will work best when you're looking at a page about a fairly specific topic, not when you want to see suggestions of other sites like the one you're on. For example, clicking on the bookmarklet from the homepage of ReadWriteWeb.com didn't refer us to similar blogs, but rather displayed links where ReadWriteWeb was mentioned and linked to, such as on NetVibes, FriendFeed, and Technorati. However, when clicking on the bookmarklet from the recent ReadWriteWeb post about OrSiSo, we were shown a couple of links of other blogs that had also written about the same topic.

According to the help section of Ambiently's web site, you should be able to modify the query displayed on the ambient page by adding or removing keywords and then clicking "update." But in our tests using Ambiently in both Firefox and Chrome on a number of pages, the section of the page where the actual query displays is no where to be seen. Our guess is that the company has removed this feature to make Ambiently even easier to use, which would make sense, but have neglected to update their web site accordingly.

That said, Ambiently could still end up being useful, especially when researching unique topics which you're having trouble locating through traditional search engine queries. But before we can say that this search tool will actually become a part of our daily routine, we'll have to live with it for a bit longer .

And we have a bookmarklet that makes it even better!

In addition, the new toolbar will allow users to see other stories on Digg from the same source, as well as related stories. Users will also be able to see some comments directly from the toolbar, though this is currently restricted to the latest, most controversial, and the most popular comments.

How to Get It

If you want to see the DiggBar in action, all you have to do is enter "digg.com/" in front of any URL, and the toolbar will automatically appear at the top of the page. Or, you can use our own DiggBar bookmarklet. Instructions for setting it up are at the end of this post.

More Features

The toolbar also features a prominent 'Random' button, that will, as the name implies, take you to a random page with a similar story that was popular on Digg in the last few days. This, of course, is very similar to what StumbleUpon does.

All of this, of course, will help to make Digg an even stickier site, as users will never quite leave the Digg experience behind, but at the same time, as MG Siegler points out on VentureBeat, this also shifts Digg's focus away from its own site, and turns Digg into a service.

No DiggBar Bookmarklet? No Problem - We Have One For You!

Sadly, Digg didn't provide users with a bookmarklet that would make it easy to quickly invoke the DiggBar without having to edit the URL, but our own Rick Turoczy just wrote up a bookmarklet for us - you just have to drag and drop this link to your bookmarks: digg bar.

After that, clicking on the link will invoke the DiggBar for any site you are currently visiting.

To use iClipper, just navigate to the page, select the bookmarklet, and tap the area you'd like to copy. iClipper will automatically take the "block level" area you've selected - the area gated by P, LI, DIV, DD, TD, TEXTAREA, or PRE markup - and place it into an email for you to send to yourself or whomever you like.

While using the bookmarklet is easy, installing it takes a few steps.

Place your iPhone in its cradle, select the "Info" tab, scroll to "Web Browser," and check "Sync Safari bookmarks." Now you're ready to install the bookmarklet. Open Safari on your desktop and add iClipper to your bookmarks. Then, head back to iTunes and sync your iPhone.

After syncing, the bookmarklet should be available from your iPhone bookmarks menu and ready to use. Now, navigate to the page from which you'd like to copy, open your bookmarks, click iClipper, tap the text you'd like to copy, and your pre-populated email will pop up.

The bookmarklet, while still fragile, works very well. It does a great job of capturing the text. And adding the page name to the subject line of the email is a nice touch.

But there are some downsides. There are no URLs to reference. All of the links in the text are stripped out and the URL of the page from which the text originally came isn't copied in the transfer. That's a valuable piece of information to be missing. But it's likely an easy addition to make. And one that developer Kent Brewster encourages others to try: "This has miles to go; if you're a developer and are thinking about taking it further, be my guest."

To get detailed instructions for installation or the source code for the bookmarklet, visit iClipper. Once you've installed it, feel free to copy and paste content from this article and send it to a friend.

Auto-Detect RSS in Chrome

On the web page http://www.feeds.ramisp.org, there are two bookmarklets available: "View RSS Feed" and Auto-Detect RSS." Drag each of these bookmarklets to Chrome's bookmark bar. Then, whenever you're on a page that has an RSS feed, you just have to hit the "Auto-Detect RSS" button. This will take you to a page where the feed is displayed along with several auto-subscription links up at the top. Alternately, you can just hit "view RSS feed," if you want to see the RSS feed in the browser, but this option didn't always work in our tests.

One of the problems with the ramisp.org bookmarklets, though, is the limited choice of RSS readers they offer underneath the "Subscribe Now!" section. Currently, you have the option to subscribe using Google, Pageflakes, My Yahoo!, and Netvibes. Although that covers many of the popular readers, there are still several that were left out.

Luckily, a commenter on LifeHacker has modified the scripts to include a few more. If you use Newsgator, Podnova, or Odeo, you should grab his bookmarklet instead from http://savanttools.com/feedhelp-bookmarklet.asp.

For Google Reader Users, Google Bookmarklets are Best

However, for Google Reader fans, the best bookmarklets for subscribing to feeds still come from Google themselves. Unlike the above options, Google addresses the issue of sites offering more than one feed. Google provides two bookmarklets to choose from for simple RSS subscribing:

Google also offers ways to note and share items using bookmarklets, too.

As handy as all these options are, at best they are still a workaround for what should be a built-in feature. Why wouldn't Google at the very least include an RSS button in Chrome that integrates directly with their own RSS Reader? We don't understand the delay on this design decision - we just hope they are working on correcting this oversight.