ReadWriteWeb

Spotify was essential to Facebook's frictionless sharing plan. But not every app is down for cluttering news feeds with moment-to-moment information about what its users are doing, saying, thinking and listening to.

Music streaming service Pandora, for one, is staying out of Facebook's social apps completely. "It's true that music is a social experience, but it's also a very private experience," Pandora founder Tim Westergren recently told CNN. "We have to be very cautious."

We wind down the top trends of 2011 with one that's perfect for the holidays. Just as the frantic, real-time nature of the social Web hit fever pitch, the market trends this year made way for "content shifting." It's the simple idea of saving your articles, videos and podcasts for later.

With the rise of the smartphone and tablet, all kinds of content can be saved until after work or school. Content shifting helps us concentrate on the tasks at hand. It also reformats it for more enjoyable experiences. Now that the Web is no longer limited to our desks, content shifting allows new media to take their rightful place on the couch.

People didn't understand the iPad immediately. No one believed in the form factor. "Just a big iPhone," people called it. But it caught on, it took off, and now consumers can't let go of their tablets. The intimate, intuitive interface has created its own use case. People curl up with the device and they read.

Publishers and app developers have provided a bonanza of ways to read on the iPad and iPhone. Some are free, some cost money, some require monthly subscriptions. All of them are vying for your attention in that new, valuable hour or two of tablet time in the evenings. But one app, Instapaper, sits in the iPad Hall of Fame on iTunes, pushing forward reader behavior just like the iPad itself. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, answered some questions for us about where this is all heading.

Instapaper, the popular content-shifting mobile app for Web articles, has rolled out a major update to its apps for iPad and iPhone.

The most immediately noticeable enhancement in Instapaper 4.0 is that the app's interface has been redesigned. On the iPad, it offers a a more magazine-like layout in which articles sit side-by-side in a grid (rather than a list). The list view still remains on the iPhone, for obvious screen real estate reasons, but its contents have been restyled.

Stop me if you've heard this one: A service that pulls in your feeds from around the Web for you to read. A service that provides a storefront for discovering and subscribing to Web publications. A service that lets you follow updates from your favorite Web personalities. A service that personalizes the news for you based on your interests and friends. A service that emails you a digest of your top stories. A service that cleans up Web articles and presents them to you in a pretty interface. A service that lets you quickly save articles to read later.

Now, name that service... Well wait, those each sound like the features of a different app you've heard of, maybe even used, don't they? Google Reader, Apple and Amazon stores, Twitter, News.me, Flipboard, Read It Later. How many of these things do you use for reading? More than one? Now, imagine if you only needed one reading app. That's what Adeel Raza, founder of Readings, imagines.

Early Tuesday morning, the FBI raided a datacenter run by the Swiss hosting company DigitalOne in what it claimed was a move to thwart "international cyber crime rings distributing scareware." But it appears as though the Feds seized a lot more than just those "scareware" servers, as, according to Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, one of the servers that the startup leased from DigitalOne was also taken.

The FBI raid on Tuesday caused outages to several services unrelated to the alleged criminal activities, including that of the bookmarking tool Pinboard. While Instapaper itself wasn't knocked offline, Arment says that the server it leases from DigitalOne remains offline.

Last month, Instapaper founder Marco Arment revealed that he'd pulled the free version of his popular "read later" app from the App Store. There were few complaints and sales of the paid version remained strong. Arment's action seemed to challenge the prevailing notion that a free app (typically an ad-supported app) is necessary or a good idea.

That may hold true for Instapaper, which has no doubt developed a strong lead in this space - a well-established and well-respected brand. Users have found value in the service, and so they pay.

But that $4.99 might be a harder sell for a new, relatively unknown startup.

Popular mobile app Instapaper isn't just a great way to catch up on reading when you're spending time offline. It's also a little bit of magic that blends the quiet of time disconnected with the buzz of the social web. It looks like that may become all the more true with the addition of a blogging tool to the Instapaper app, if a public conversation about the matter can be taken literally.

Instapaper stores stripped-down copies of articles you select from the web, but offline on your device so you can read without connectivity. With the latest version of the app launched a few months ago, you can designate an article for sharing out on Twitter or Facebook once you get back online later. Today WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg asked Instapaper founder Marco Arment to enable posting to a WordPress blog from inside Instapaper. "I'll make it happen," was Arment's response. Cool!

Let's say you're about to get on an airplane. That means it's time for some pleasure reading, if you're lucky enough to be free from work obligations on a wifi-free flight. What you need to do is fire up Instapaper, the offline mobile reading application made for good times like this.

Instapaper announced its 3.0 version tonight and has added a long list of features that will please and delight you. It was already a great way to read good articles without internet connectivity. Now it includes: an in-line browser that will make grabbing things to read offline really easy, qued social sharing so you can post links to share great articles automatically when you come back online, social discovery of articles your Twitter and Facebook friends have Liked on Instapaper and much more. It's a big update to a great app.

Instapaper announced today that its full API is now available to developers. The documentation is here. Up until now, developers have been able to add articles to a users Instapaper account using the API, but haven't been able to give uses access to their articles. According to Instapaper creator Marco Arment, third party applications that allow users to read articles actually scrape Instapaper site for content. Developers will now be able to pull down articles from the API, but there is a catch.