ReadWriteWeb

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.

This month ReadWriteWeb is publishing a series of top 10 lists of the best products of 2010, each based on a specific category. This post is a little different, in that it's my own personal top 10 list of my favorite products of 2010. I'm not claiming these are the best products of the year, only that they're the products I used and loved the most. Some were new in 2010 (iPad, Flipboard), some came into their own due to the way trends played out (Instapaper, Evernote), some were relative 'oldies but goodies' that I simply got a lot of joy out of this year (Facebook, Shazam).

Here are my favorites, in no particular order...

Popularity isn't the best judge of quality, but it's not a bad place to start - especially in a pinch. Instapaper is a wonderful app that captures online articles and stores them for clean offline reading on your mobile device. InstapaperFeed is one of many apps built by independent developers on top of Instapaper, but it's an especially cool one I think.

Here's how it works. First, give InstapaperFeed access to your accounts on both Instapaper and Twitter. Then the app will look at every link shared by someone you're following on Twitter, look for the ones that link shortening service Bit.ly has clickthrough numbers for, and post the most popular ones each day to your Instapaper account. What a smart little hack!

If you're an Instapaper user on your iPhone or iPad - and, really, you should be - you'll be pleased with the major update that the app has just received. Among the coolest of the new features is Dark Mode, which based on the time of sunset in your particular location, allows the app to automatically switch from the "daytime" mode of black text on a light screen to the "nighttime" mode of white text on a darker background. If you read with the light on, you can trigger Dark Mode manually.

If that alone - plus the app's marked improvement in speed - were all that the update contained, I'd be happy.

Yesterday we published an interview with the founder of Instapaper, Marco Arment. In this post on ReadWriteHack, we look at Arment's product development philosophy. And he knows what he's talking about. Instapaper, a cross-platform app that saves web pages for reading later, is the second popular web service that Marco Arment has developed. He was co-founder and lead developer of Tumblr, the leading light blogging service.

As a developer of web applications, Marco Arment is the kind of guy who builds things fast, gets it out there and iterates quickly. I asked him: is that pretty much his philosophy, or is there more to it?

A common theme of our product innovation series has been exploring applications that take advantage of new devices - and the user experience patterns that evolve out of that. Instapaper is perfect example of this. It started out as a web application, then embraced smart phones, and now it's being used by many iPad owners. In a nutshell, Instapaper is an app that saves web pages for reading later. But unlike older 'web 2.0' social bookmarking services, it doesn't just bookmark a web page. Instapaper saves a copy of the content so it can be read later, offline if need be, within the app.

Instapaper was launched in January 2008 by the co-founder of Tumblr, Marco Arment. In fact Arment has only just gone full-time with Instapaper, announcing last month that he's moving on from Tumblr after 4 years as its lead developer. He has big plans for Instapaper as a business, as you'll discover in this interview.

Most of the writing you find on the Web - including here on ReadWriteWeb - is relatively short. Long-form journalism often doesn't fit into the 24-hour news cycle and most online readers don't really have the time to sit down and dedicate half an hour to just one story on the Web in the middle of the week. Longform.org aims to highlight the best long-form journalism on the web and make it more convenient to read these stories. Thanks to its integration with Instapaper, Longform.org makes it easy to bookmark these long stories and read them on your mobile phone or iPad once you can dedicate enough time to them.