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."

Some of the new social apps include food-photo app Foodspotting, recipe app Foodily, ticket-buying app Ticketmaster, the visually oriented social network Pinterest, movie-reviewing site Rotten Tomatoes, and travel site TripAdvisor.

The open graph push officially happened on Wednesday, but news made its way around the tech news world on Tuesday.

At f8 last year, Zuckerberg laid out the future of social apps: "We think that people are going to want to share all kinds of things with their lives and we think that apps are the way they want to show them."

Because, believes Zuckerberg, "no activity is too big or small to share."

Not everyone agrees. Not all information is public, and it's up to the user to decide what they feel comfortable "sharing," opting-out if necessary. Our own John Paul Titlow turned off his Facebook Spotify integration months ago.

Listening to music alone, either on a jog or just laying in bed, is one of those meditative experiences. So is reading articles that are longer than 500 words. Instapaper is one avenue for that long-form reading experience. Users can, of course, share the stories they've instapaper'ed out to Facebook and Twitter. But would Instapaper ever consider a Facebook social app?

"I don't believe that people want to auto-share everything they read without some other manual filter in front of it," replies Instapaper founder Marco Arment.

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.

Podcasting has been the content-shifted future of radio since the early days of the iPod. But its growth was limited by the barriers of regularly syncing via USB. The era of the smartphone and tablet has freed users from that constraint.

The tablet in particular has made leisure reading and viewing of Web content a reality. Sales of the iPad have smashed expectations. Amazon's Kindle Fire, which is specialized for leisure content, has found mass appeal as well.

We've seen some great studies from Google and BBC.com this year showing that consumers love the tactile, personal tablet experience. They use tablets as leisure devices, allowing them to separate the fun stuff from the work stuff they do on their PCs.

Apple & Amazon's End-to-End Content

The big end-to-end consumer tech companies have tried to keep this all under their umbrellas. With iOS 5, Lion and iCloud, Apple proposes a vision of content shifting that happens unconsciously. Music, videos, documents and bookmarks are all just there when users look for them, no matter which device they're on.

Apple added a feature called Reading List to its Safari browser, which lets users create temporary bookmarks for Web articles. It also expanded Safari's Reader mode to the mobile versions. Safari Reader pops up a clean version of an article, without navigation or ads, to make reading on the Web more sane. The combination of Reading List and Reader mode makes for a basic but pleasant content-shifted reading experience.

None of it works perfectly, of course, but Apple would like it to.

iPad Is A Product, Kindle Is A Service

For Apple, content is more like a feature. Apple's in the device business, and it offers content to support users of its devices. The iPhone, the iPad, the iPod and the Mac are the products. Amazon does things the other way around. Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet rounds out its line of inexpensive, less powerful devices that give users access to Kindle content, which is where Amazon makes its money.

Kindle is a service, not a product. The devices are just windows into Amazon's store of content, which is streamed or whisper-synced down to them. Amazon uses its powerful cloud to keep the latest content on each Kindle device, and even on iOS and Android devices running the Kindle app. For Kindle books and magazines, content shifting is as simple as syncing your page number.

Content Shifting In the Consumer Cloud

There's still plenty of room for content shifting solutions from Web companies that aren't tied to particular platforms.

Evernote, a company working on many different problems in the consumer cloud, has built Clearly, an article-saving service. It's a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that creates a cleaned-up article view, similar to Safari Reader mode, but it also allows saving of the clean version to one's Evernote account with one click. The article can then be read later via the Evernote app on a tablet or smartphone, as well as on the desktop.

Instapaper has an established presence in the iTunes App Store as a dedicated read-later service. Using a browser bookmarklet or connecting to the many RSS readers and Twitter clients that allow fast link saving to Instapaper, readers can save clean versions of Web articles they want to read with just one click.

When you launch the Instapaper app, it caches the articles, so you can even read offline. This is a solution to the attention problems posed by the real-time Web. If you see an article you want to read, you don't have to be distracted. Just send to Instapaper and get back to work. Check out our interview with Instapaper creator Marco Arment for his perspective on how content shifting is changing reading.

There's also Read It Later, an Instapaper competitor that's going for cross-platform presence rather than focus on two devices. Its creator used Read It Later data to publish a fascinating blog post at the beginning of the year demonstrating the content shifting trend. It compared desktop, smartphone and tablet users' reading habits, and the iPad users are clearly shifting their content to the evening, with a little bit of reading over breakfast.

Content shifting of articles is happening, and it's getting started with Web-based video, too. The Internet TV service Boxee offers an iPad app and bookmarklet that allows saving of Web videos for later, whether on your TV or your iPad (if you've got the gadgets). It takes a bit of work to get it going, but Richard MacManus wrote a how-to guide for content-shifting video with Boxee.

Some of the sharpest minds in the industry are thinking about content shifting, and we had some great interviews about it from this year. Tech investor extraordinaire Fred Wilson talked about content shifting at our 2Way Summit this year. We discussed the iPad and the future of reading with Instapaper's Marco Arment. And we talked to Jori Lallo, creator of a link-saving service called Kippt, about the practice of saving Web links on your digital bookshelf.

Do you use any content shifting services? Share your workflows and playflows in the comments.

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.

At this point, Apple's lead in tablets is daunting. At a base price of $499, the 9.5-inch iPad and the devices it inspired are even encroaching on the bottom end of the PC market. Apple's "post-PC world" rhetoric is projected to be surprisingly prescient.

But there seems to be room below the iPad in the market. Surveys found consumers clamoring for a cheaper tablet, and Apple competitors have begun to deliver. Amazon announced the 7-inch, $199 Kindle Fire in September, and in response Barnes & Noble unveiled a $249 Nook Tablet yesterday with twice the memory and storage space of the Fire.

The Amazon and Barnes & Noble tablets are geared towards consumption, as one would expect from two companies whose businesses were built on selling books and music. Apple is in the content business as well, though it positions the iPad to be for much more than that. Even so, consumption, specifically reading, of quality content has been reborn on the iPad.

The Reading App Gold Rush

Developers have built all kinds of applications to deliver the ideal iPad reading experience, and Big Publishing wants in on the action. Flipboard publishers now show magazine-style full-page ads, and Zite was bought by CNN. AOL made Editions, Yahoo made Livestand, Google's making Propeller, all to do the same thing. It's a gold rush.

Publishers are even building their own apps now, and the new iOS 5 Newsstand provides a home for them. The Guardian iPad edition launched the same day as iOS 5. The New Yorker iPad app has surpassed 100,000 readers. These are first-rate iPad experiences, not just crumpled Web views, and they're finding traction as subscription publications.

Instapaper's Content Shift

But one $5 app, not affiliated with any publishers, showing no advertisements, requiring no "monetizing" other than its modest price tag, and created by one person, has remained near the top of the heap of iOS reading apps all along. Instapaper continues to introduce iPad and iPhone readers to the notion of content-shifting, saving one's daily Web reading with one click, so that it can be read later from one sparse, quiet place, even offline.

Really, Instapaper can be read in three places; anyone can use Instapaper.com from her or his desktop, tablet or smartphone. But it's also a universal $5 app for iPhone and iPad, and the release of Instapaper 4.0 last month redesigned the experience as the self-curated, instant newspaper for iOS 5.

Arment recently answered a few questions for us about Instapaper, iOS and the future of reading:

***ReadWriteWeb:** Do you think about the big picture for Web content, or is that not really your concern?*

Marco Arment: "I want Instapaper to be a tool that people use to read longer pieces, and more attentively, than they otherwise would have. By doing this, I hope to make it more feasible for publishers to maintain an audience while publishing articles more substantial than what we usually see on formulaic high-volume blogs."

***RWW:** What are your plans for Give Me Something To Read?*

MA: "Give Me Something To Read serves Instapaper very well as a curated list of the best long-form nonfiction writing and reporting. My plans are to keep it going, really -- it's exactly where I want it to be."

***RWW:** You said recently that you don't like to emphasize the offline part of Instapaper. Why is that? Isn't that a distinguishing feature?*

MA: "It's certainly a very good and useful feature, but it's not a feature that a lot of people know that they need, so they aren't looking for a solution to that problem. Once they have Instapaper, it's a feature that most customers use and benefit from very often, but it's not a very good selling point."

***RWW:** Is iOS changing the way we read at a platform level? The great RSS readers have some of their most compelling apps ever on iOS, and the competitors in the publishing biz are there, too. Even major content sites (like The Guardian) are starting to put save-for-later functionality into native apps. Is the nature of the whole platform responsible for this? Or have you just inspired everyone?*

MA: "The iPhone, and especially the iPad, have brought a fundamental shift to the publishing business: it's now very easy for customers to pay for apps and content directly, with small amounts of money, in large volumes. This wasn't (and still isn't) practical on the web. And with the rising popularity of iOS, many millions of people are devoting more of their computing time to devices that are much better suited for reading than desktops and laptops.

"These two shifts, more than anything, have brought new life to the publishing business, from big newspapers and magazines to individual bloggers, by increasing demand for content and making it easier to make money without wedging ads everywhere.

"Instapaper and its various clones help bridge the web and iOS worlds. There's relatively little competition only because it's a very new problem that the mass market has yet to realize that they have. It's not just "read later", but "read elsewhere" - most people would prefer the reading experience on an iPad to a web browser on a PC."

The iPad And The Couch

Instapaper is not the only cross-platform content-shifting app out there, and we've argued that all tablet reading apps should have the feature. The Guardian's new iPad app does.

But the single content-shifting app, - like Instapaper or Read It Later - pulls all the day's articles into one familiar place, like the iPad's equivalent of the couch on which we read it. That's the most important part of the future of content, which the ad-riddled Web is only just starting to understand: the experience.

Marco Arment is the creator of Instapaper. He also blogs about technology (and coffee) at Marco.org, and he hosts Build & Analyze a weekly news and discussion show about iPhone, iPad, iOS and mobile Web development with Dan Benjamin on 5by5. Follow him on Twitter @marcoarment.

Do you use any content-shifting apps for your daily reading? Share your digital reading habits in the comments.

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.

A refreshed UI is only the beginning of what this update includes. There are improvements to the reading experience itself, such as the option to adjust the screen's brightness from the app and invert the colors of the text and background (white on black as opposed to black on white). The app also makes better use of the iPhone's limited screen real estate by hiding the status bar that normally sits across the top of the screen.

The app also features more condensed footnotes and enhancements to how articles are archived and deleted. Not only is the distinction between "archive" and delete" more clear in this version, but you can multi-select articles from the home screen to get rid of them in bulk.

One of the cooler features in the new version of the app is its Wikipedia integration. Instapaper now lets you look up words and phrases on Wikipedia as you read, just as you've long been able to look up words in the dictionary. The app displays a brief description of a topic from Wikipedia and provides a link to the full article should you want to find out more.

Improved content discovery is something that's baked into this update in a few places. The "Friends" tab now shows content from all of your social contacts, rather than just those who have Instapaper accounts. This brings Instapaper a notch closer to what Flipboard does, albeit without the famously slick, page-turning UI.

Version 4.0 also includes a new article search tool, which scans the full text of every article you have saved in Instapaper. It's available as part of the service's $1 per month subscription, so those dying to use it will have to pay up.

This really is the biggest update to Instapaper in quite some time. For the full list of new features, check out developer Marco Arment's in-depth blog post announcing version 4.0.

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.

By offering these different ways of following content, Readings aims to provide the best one-stop reading shop with its news feed. Not only does Readings allow you to subscribe directly to publications, it automatically identifies individual authors from all the publications listed and lets you follow them personally. According to Raza, the site currently features 54,000 individual authors. The author feed includes the author's posts to his or her main site, but it also draws in public posts from Twitter, Facebook and Flickr (with more services to come), making it a central location for any kinds of updates from that person. The ability to follow individual authors is a distinguishing feature, and it's made possible by the inclusion of all the other feeds.

Currently, Readings creates author feeds automatically by scraping the sites whose content it pulls in, which are themselves created based on popularity around the Web. Eventually, though, Readings wants authors to control and curate their own author feeds. "Our real plan is not to keep it automated forever," Raza says. "Our real plan is for authors to be able to sign up there and own their own profile." But the author page won't be just another site for content creators to update. It will pull in their updates from Twitter and existing services. "We just want to complement the feeds that you have," Raza says, by combining them all in one place.

Raza says that Readings currently lists about 15,000 publications, and while it mostly just aggregates, it has more involved partnerships with some sites. For example, while subscribing directly to CNN.com feeds through an RSS reader only provides an excerpt, CNN and Readings have arranged to show the whole text. Currently, Readings doesn't scrape content from paywalled sites, but eventually it would be able to feature them in the store after arranging a partnership.

Concentrating on growth

For now, though, Readings is concentrated on growing its user base, rather than its retinue of authors or publishers. Raza says they plan to launch an iPad app in "about a month." The site has been open for a month, and Raza says that it's still in public beta, but the last month has been spent busily fixing bugs and performance issues without concentrating on gaining users. "We made the system stable," says Raza, "we made it scalable, and that's done now."

The algorithms behind the scenes do some nifty work to present the content attractively, even though it's a largely automated process. For example, Raza says the algorithm for identifying a story's key image can even find it in a frame of an embedded video if there's no static image in the post.

Saving for later

The Read Later feature is one of the most ambitious features of Readings, since dedicated read-later services like Read It Later and Instapaper are so well-established. Those services are most valuable for their ability to save content from any Web page and cache it in a personal reading list for later, with all one's collected reading available in one place. Readings offers a browser bookmarklet that offers the same feature, even for sites and publications not included in its database.

Until the Readings mobile app launches, the other read-later services will have a leg up, but depending on how the app is executed, this could be a big move. Currently, one has to use other apps for finding reading material and save to the Read It Later or Instapaper service from there. Readings can offer new content from feeds and saved stories all in one place. It also reminds users of unread items in the weekly email digest (you can turn it off), which Instapaper and Read It Later don't do, so stories tend to quickly pile up there, if one isn't dedicated about reading every day.

The one key feature where reading apps have to compete, though, is the visual reading experience itself. If it's hard to read in an app, users won't do it. That's why services that improve the visual reading experience exist in the first place, since most content sites are so cluttered. Readings makes a concerted effort to make its content beautiful, converting all fonts to Verdana with adjustable sizes and arranging text in neat, squared-off paragraphs around embedded images. This only works for supported publications, though; saved pages from outside Readings will load in full within the Readings iframe.

And the Web interface of Readings still has a ways to go to look as good (or be as customizable) as Read It Later and Instapaper, and there is no native tablet version yet. That will be a crowded market, too; in addition to the native Read It Later and Instapaper apps, Flipboard has put some advanced Web technology to work to create its layouts, and it allows publishers to customize their layouts for reading in Flipboard.

But for a first public version, Readings is an impressive reading solution, and anything that can reduce the number of apps and websites required just to read one's daily articles is a welcome addition to the market. Interface improvements are less important than powerful underlying software, and Readings has that. Could it be enough to disrupt the personal reading space by rolling so many services into one? Time will tell.

What apps, sites, or services do you use to manage your daily reading? Let us know in the comments.

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.

Arment was using this server as a MySQL replication slave to help improve the site's performance. Without this server, says Arment, Instapaper has been slower. While, yes, Instapaper did remain online, the results of the seizure are still incredibly troubling.

Arment says that the FBI now presumably is in possession of a complete copy of the Instapaper database, including a full list of users and any non-deleted bookmarks. While passwords for Instapaper are stored only as hashes, the email addresses associated with users are stored in the clear as are the contents of the bookmarks. The server also contained a complete copy of the Instapaper website codebase.

Arment laments that, "due to the police culture in the United States, especially at the federal level, I don't expect to ever get an explanation for this, have the server or its data returned, or be reimbursed for the damage they have illegally caused."

The FBI has been actively seizing domains lately, something that the EFF among others are challenging as First Amendment violations. The seizure of the DigitalOne servers certainly points to other problems that are being caused by the U.S. government's efforts to crack down on "cybercrime."

As an avid Instapaper and Pinboard user, I certainly don't feel safer now. Do you?

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!

WordPress's Mullenweg says that his team is working on API changes that will make this sort of integration even easier. That makes me wonder where else we'll see WordPress integration in the future. Blogging may not seem as hip as it used to in these days of Facebook and Twitter but (and I'm totally blogging this, right now) it's still got a unique power and place in the social web. It always will - and that unique phenomenon that is blogging will likely continue to find new places to manifest itself throughout the larger technology universe. Instapaper looks like a great one of those places to me.

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.

The net effect is that this app that's great for taking valuable content from the online world with you offline will no longer leave you feeling stranded and alone once you've made the time to get excited about what you found. Instapaper just feels good to use, but now that it's got so much more connectivity - it's probably only going to be better.

Competitor ReadItLater includes a number of the same features already. It also supports video viewing and offers an automated categorization system on its iPad app. It may be a case of different strokes for different folks, but there's something especially joyful to me about reading long articles on a plane on Instapaper.

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

Without a doubt my favorite new device of the year was the iPad. It changed how I consume content, particularly media content and long-form writing. This year I read a large novel on the Kindle for iPad app (Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen - an excellent book!), I subscribed to magazines using the Zinio app on my iPad (Juxtapoz, Rolling Stone and others) and I found new ways to sort through and read online articles (Flipboard, Instapaper, DropBox and more). I also enjoyed the range of apps released by media businesses - Wired, New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, and more.

Facebook

We at ReadWriteWeb have given Facebook a fair amount of criticism this year - for privacy failures, bad design, de-valuing third party content, and more. Despite all that, I've come to love using Facebook! This year I used Facebook for everything from updating my thoughts while out and about, to posting my check-ins via Foursquare, to uploading photos I'd just taken of my local beach.

The best part of Facebook this year, for me, was all of my family joining it. My Mum and Dad, along with my 2 brothers and 1 sister. All of them joined (or in one case resumed use of) Facebook this year. Much to my delight, because now I can follow my brother's power lifting videos, my other brother's iPod Touch finger paintings, my sister's new-found interest in photography, my mother's motherly comments and likes, my father's witty updates. These are obviously all personal things to me, but I'm sure that you all have had similar experiences with your family or friends on Facebook this year.

Instapaper

I mentioned Instapaper above and it's certainly one of my most used apps on the iPad. More importantly, Instapaper changed the way I consume blog and other media content. Due to a number of factors, over 2010 I didn't have enough time or attention to regularly read content from Google Reader (my RSS Reader of choice). I ended up evolving to a different style of tracking and reading the news of the day. I generally now visit my favorite blogs and news aggregators, open articles of interest to me and then save them to Instapaper for later reading - usually on my iPad or iPhone. I also find stories via Twitter and Facebook, which I save the same way.

Shazam

I continue to marvel at the technology behind Shazam's iPhone app. For anyone who isn't familiar with it: if you hear a song playing on the radio or in the background at a store, open up Shazam and it will identify the title and artist. I use it often to find out what song is playing on my car radio, or at a bar or office. It's the only app I use that makes me consistently mutter to myself: how do they do that?

Evernote

I still use my red Moleskine Cahier notebooks for freeform scribbling and note-taking. However, Evernote has increasingly become my home for other kinds of notes and for personal lists.

I admire Evernote's grand goal to become your "online brain" - to store everything from your lists, to notes about foods you discover, to photos of business cards. I'm nowhere near using it to that extent, but perhaps next year I'll extend my use cases for this product. It's nice that Evernote has that flexibility, in any case.

TweetDeck

I still find Twitter to be a user experience mess at times. For example, little bugs with Twitter lists that seem to occur every time I use them. TweetDeck has some of those frustrations too - in particular the syncing between devices is troublesome and imperfect. Nevertheless, I use TweetDeck each and every day to manage and write to @RWW (the company account, since August 2010) and @ricmacnz (my personal account now - follow me there if you can put up with my art and music ramblings).

Woopra

Without a doubt the most addictive business tool I use. Tracking statistics for ReadWriteWeb is a crucial part of my work and Woopra provides a real-time view of what's happening on ReadWriteWeb at any time of the day. I check it constantly. I get warm fuzzies when I see the WikiLeaks website driving lots of traffic to RWW. I smile inwardly when I see one of my own posts doing well. I frown when a post that I wrote isn't setting the online world on fire. My curiosity is piqued when I see an old post getting action all of a sudden. So many emotions to sustain me through my working day as an online publisher!

Foursquare

At the beginning of the year, everybody was wondering which of the location-based social networks would take off: Brightkite, Gowalla, Foursquare, or a new entrant? The answer in 2010 has been Foursquare, which most of the people in my social graph use. I began to use it too, although frankly there isn't a lot of practical benefit to Foursquare where I live - not enough people in my city use it for there to be real-time social benefits, nor have there been any discount coupons for me. However, I have found it to be a fun addition to my Facebook updates. I hope it becomes more useful though, because the game mechanics aren't enough to sustain me.

Chrome

In 2009 I switched from Firefox to Chrome, as my default browser. I felt bad for Mozilla, the organization that builds Firefox and whose ideals I admire. However, Chrome was simply faster and less prone to crashes. Chrome has continued to serve me well over 2010 and the addition of the Chrome App Store makes me curious about what it will offer in 2011.

The browser market is fiercely competitive currently and I did check out a new entrant, RockMelt, recently. However I stuck with Chrome, as it hasn't let me down.

Flipboard

Like many people, I'm enamored of the iPad app Flipboard and the way it's changed how web content is consumed. I must admit that I'm not a daily user though. I sometimes feel like I'm flipping through too much content I just don't want to consume. I'd like more serendipity. Perhaps I haven't populated it yet with the right Twitter lists.

Still, I hold out a lot of hope for Flipboard's magazine paradigm of consuming blog and similar content. In 2011, I plan to use Flipboard a lot more.

Honorable mentions

Products that didn't quite make my top 10, but which I use a lot and enjoy: Soup.io (my light blogging service of choice), Diamedic (an awesome iPhone app for diabetics), Lazyweb (my favorite topic tracker of the year, but this is a field which I think still needs a lot of work), DropBox (great way to sync files across devices), Mediagazer (probably my favorite news aggregator currently), Newsy (a video news app for iPad that I enjoyed throughout 2010) and Brushes (a finger painting app for iPad and iPhone).

There you have it, my favorite Web products of 2010. Let me know your own picks in the comments!

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

The app has also added account syncing with Mobile Safari, new sharing options, article preview on the iPhone, and a (slightly) easier bookmarklet installation. (The latter is a problem with iOS, not with Instapaper. "Please, Apple, fix bookmarklet installation in Mobile Safari!" reads Instapaper's blog post announcing the updated app.)

To add new articles to Instapaper, you can now simply ad an "i" before the "http" to a URL.

Richard MacManus interviewed Instapaper's Marco Ament earlier this fall. You can read the interview here to see how Instapaper was developed, as well as some of Ament's thoughts on the future of the app. If this update is any indication, Ament's now full-time attention to Instapaper bodes well for its future.

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.

Marco Arment: Yes, that's correct. It's more continuing it as a business, because it's kind of always been one. Just now I have more time to spend on it.

RM: How did you come up with the idea for Instapaper and what was the inspiration for it?

MA: I'd just gotten an iPhone in the fall of '07. I would find things during the workday that I wanted to read, but I was at work - so I really couldn't. I would skim articles [or] I would open a tab and never go back to it, until my browser crashed and then I forgot about it. Or some other non-solution to this problem. [chuckle] And then similarly, I had to commute on the train everyday for about an hour or two. When I was on the train, I had my iPhone and I could browse the internet - but only before it went underground. There were a load of things I had to read.

So I made Instapaper just for myself, really, and didn't even tell anybody about it for about three months after I made it. I just used it myself, just because I wanted something to use to temporarily store those links - so that I could save them at work and read them on the train.

That's how it started and it was very, very basic. In the beginning, there wasn't even a text view. And the reason I got the text view was because mobile Safari [on iPhone] would kick pages out of memory if you load it too much. And so what I was trying to do was load a bunch of pages at once, before the train went underground and before I lost my connectivity for about 25 minutes or so. The text view allowed me to store more than in the mobile browser, because they were much lighter.

Also when I would scroll on the iPhone, I hated if I accidentally lost the alignment in the column I was reading. It would accidentally scroll drag me a little bit and I couldn't scroll it up again. [chuckle] So I made it single-column reading.

I told a couple of friends about it, about three months in, and they loved it. So on January 26th, 2008, I made my initial blog post about it and it just exploded! It was popular very quickly, far past my expectations. I wasn't sure if anybody else would find it useful. [laughter] I figured that I just thought of myself, that it's useful to me but... I was very pleasantly surprised by its reception.

RM: What was the time period between the time that you came up with the idea and when you launched Instapaper in January 2008?

MA: It was about three months.

RM: So it was a very quick development process...

MA: Yeah. I developed the basics of the service in about two nights. It was a very basic service. And I already had a lot of the framework. I already had a lot of that written for other things, including Tumblr. It was in a language I already knew and a framework I already knew. And so I made the entire first draft of the service, I guess you can call it, in about two nights.

How the iPad Version Was Developed

RM: And when did you come up with the iPad version of Instapaper and the idea of integrating that with iPad apps?

MA: I was already doing all these weird mobile Safari apps, so I jumped right on the opportunity to make a real app as soon as it came. I was in the iPhone store on day one, of course. Sorry, actually on day two or three. [chuckle] I tried to be there on day one but missed it. Anyway, so I was in the iPad store right in summer '08 when it launched.

So when the iPad was announced and the SDK for it, I knew I needed an iPad app in addition to the iPhone app. I also decided pretty early on that I would make a universal app which would work on both - preferably optimized interfaces for each one - and that was only half done [at the time the iPad was announced]. The question was really whether I wanted to release that in advance of the launch of the iPad, so it would be there on day one. But I would never have a chance to actually try it on an iPad before submitting it, which is certainly a risk. Or I could wait until after I used an iPad physically and optimize it, then submit it afterward.

I chose to go with the option of having it there on day one [i.e. releasing it before the iPad launched] and taking that risk. And it worked out alright. The first version was functional. It was not pretty, but it worked. And yeah, there were some buttons which were badly placed, the colors were way too bright, the screen was much brighter than I thought it would be. So I made a few tweaks and released an update, a couple of weeks later.

RM: I'm finding the Instapaper app very useful on iPad, for example when I'm using Flipboard and I can save articles I find there to read later on. I like the integration with other apps in the App Store as well.

MA: Thanks. That's been a huge benefit for Instapaper. The first app I ever made was for Tweetie for iPhone. Now, almost every mobile Twitter client and almost every mobile feed reader has a 'Send to Instapaper' feature.

Next Page: Instapaper usage patterns & the future of the product...

RM: What are the main usage patterns that you've noticed so far with Instapaper - and has anything surprised you about how people are using it? Whether on the iPhone, or iPad or even on the web.

MA: Yeah, there have been few surprises. One of the biggest was when I first launched the iPhone app, I thought that it would just be people who are already familiar with the web app - that they'd want the iPhone app to go along with it. Okay, that's pretty much the way I use it. I use the web app first and the iPhone app as an accessory to it. And what surprised me was from the very beginning - and it still holds true today - how many people do both the browsing and the reading on the iPhone. Instapaper is really optimized for browsing on the computer and then reading on the iPhone. But a lot of people just do everything on the iPhone.

Another big surprise was that the iPad has taken off like crazy. At least half of my paid app sales are from the iPad, which given the size of its relative installed base (iPad versus the iPhone), that's a pretty impressive number.

The iPad has proven to be a better device for reading content than even I expected. I had high hopes for it, but I thought it would be about the same for reading as the iPhone. And it ended up that a lot more people find the bigger screen more comfortable. So a lot more people are reading web content on the iPad than on the iPhone.

RM: Yes, that's certainly been my experience. So is the success of the iPad what prompted you to go full time on the business?

MA: Oh sure, that was a huge part. Especially because the iPad sales [of Instapaper] have more than doubled my overall sales since the iPad came out. So it finally gave me enough momentum to take it full time.

RM: Right. And are you hiring other people in the business?

MA: Not at the moment. I do have a contractor who edits the front page editor's picks, also called "Give me something to read." It's the popular, good, long form stories saved by users. So I have a contractor who does that. But otherwise it's just me.

In the future I might hire employees to help out with certain things, but I have no immediate plans to do that.

The Future of Instapaper

RM: Let's discuss the future of the product. Do you plan to expand to other delivery platforms, or are you going to stay focused on iPad and iPhone?

MA: For now, I'm certainly focusing on the iOS platform and also on the Kindle. I really do like the Kindle a lot. It's a much smaller market, but it's a very devoted and very hardcore market - people who really love reading. So right now it's iOS and Kindle. I don't have any immediate plans to support Android or Blackberry, or other mobile platforms directly. But what I'm going to do is make a full feature API, so that other people can write clients for those if they want to.

Right now there are a few Android clients that are unofficial, but because there's no good official API they have just kind of scraped the site to try and make it work. And it's worked with mixed success. So hopefully a real API will encourage better clients to be made.

RM: Will Instapaper add more social sharing and curation features in the near future? [hat-tip Justin Houk for suggesting this question via Twitter]

MA: That's a good question. One thing I do want to do is have better export support for services that will help you with long-time archival. Things like Evernote, Delicious and Pinboard. So I definitely want to add those. I wouldn't really classify any of those, except maybe Delicious, as social though. And Delicious, while it is technically social, I don't think it's really used like that as much anymore - if it ever was. So I want to add features that help people with their own organization.

I also want to add features that help people with information overload management. I don't want Instapaper to just be another bucket for the thousands of items that you have deal with and that you feel obligated and burdened by. That's the last thing I want. So what I really want to do is give people tools to help them manage information overload [so] that it's not a burden, that relieves them of stress rather than adding to it.

Regarding social features, I have a few draft ideas in my head of some kind of sharing features. For the most part they're very, very alpha stage. But even in my head there's something I roughly want to do. It's the kind of feature that before I was doing this full time, which was only two weeks ago, I would never have had the time to do non-essential features like that. Now that I have time to do that sort of thing, I will probably explore those options in the future.

Longform.org is the brainchild of Max Linsky - a former Creative Loafing reporter and Slate contributor - and Aaron Lammer. The stories on the site cover a wide range of topics, ranging from Neal Pollack's recent Wired story about the check-in wars, to this New Yorker story about elevators from 2008 and this in-depth look at a penal colony off the coast of Panama. The selection of stories on the site is obviously subjective, but if you come across a great story that hasn't appeared on the site yet, you can also submit your own suggestions.

You can find a more in-depth look behind the scenes of Longform.org in the Slate piece here, but if you are looking for some stimulating reading material just head over to the site and give it a try. You can read the stories without an Instapaper account, but the site's tight integration with this service allows you to easily bookmark stories and read them on the Instapaper mobile apps later.

ReadBag

ReadBag is a quick and easy bookmarklet to save links for later. ReadBag requires a Google Account to use the service, though OpenID might have been a better choice. The UI is simple and clean with all the features available from the homepage. You can archive bookmarks after you're done reading them, star them, add a note, or simply delete them. ReadBag includes a host of goodies such importing options, a Firefox extension, Google Reader integration, Google Gears support, RSS for your bookmarks, and a mobile interface for both regular phones and the iPhone. Unfortunately, ReadBag doesn't support tagging.

Instapaper

Instapaper is a really simple "bookmark it for later" service. With only a simple bookmarklet to bookmark items, Instapaper doesn't offer nearly as much as its competitors. You can edit the title and url of your bookmarks, grab an RSS feed, and add a note to your links. There is one great feature that's available when you click the 'text' link at the end of each bookmark. Instapaper allows you to read your bookmark right from the site with no hassles. All in all, the service is very straightforward with a clean UI and zero distractions.

LaterLoop

A new tool from the maker of social bookmarking service Mento, LaterLoop offers the best features out of the group. There's a neat extension for Firefox that features keyboard shortcuts, mobile support, import and sharing options with Del.icio.us, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and more. Offline support is integrated with Scrapbook Firefox extension instead of Google Gears. You can also read a text only version of your links. However, the UI for text only reminds me of the horrible reformatting job that Google does for mobile phones. Overall, LaterLoop sports a clean and uncluttered UI just like the rest of the pack.

LinkRiver

We've reviewed LinkRiver as a great service to find more news on a slow day. Well, when the pace picks up and you find yourself not having enough time, LinkRiver offers a handy bookmarklet to save items for later. If you're a user of the site, you can also bookmark content for later directly from your profile.

FriendFeed: Read Later

Fans of the FriendFeed aggregation service will love using the Read Later Greasemonkey script. This script allows you to save entries in FriendFeed for later. It's a very useful tool for reading FriendFeed quickly and coming back to the articles that might get buried under the constant stream of activity. Once installed, you'll begin seeing 'Later' appended to the end of each item. There's also a convenient tab that the script adds to FriendFeed for browsing through your saves.

Bonus: Star it in Google Reader

If you're using Google Reader to go through the never-ending process of reading feeds, Google's 'Star' feature can be a great way to save items for later. To quickly process your feeds, change your display to 'List View' in Google Reader. Then star only the headlines that jump out at you. 'Mark all as read' and repeat until all your feeds have been processed. Now you won't have so many feeds to read and a lot more time to weed through only what might be interesting whenever you have time.

Leisure Reading

When you're short on time, these services are great way to put things on hold. They allow users to come back and read things at a more leisure pace without wasting time or feeling overwhelmed. Just be sure you actually go back and read them. Otherwise, you may have some serious catching up to do.