I got a Kindle and a large sum of money for Amazon from two of my sisters for Xmas. If that weren’t enough, I’ve now got Instapaper on it. This is going to be pretty huge.
Instapaper is slowly evolving from the greatest web application I have started using in the past year into another inbox chore. The number of saved articles I have has surpassed my ability to manage which ones I’d even like to read at this point.
Someone suggested recently that long form article writing is making a comeback precisely because of these bookmarking technologies (as well as the Reader feature in Safari 5). That’s great. I argue, however, that it is very hard to back this observation up if you can’t tell if people actually read the article or not.
Arment, who is also the lead developer behind Tumblr, said Instapaper.com gets about 3 million page views per month and that the service has a few hundred thousand active users altogether. Poynter Online
I happen to be of the persuasion that at least a statistically significant number of these users are like myself. We are people who are excited to have found a place to store the myriad of articles that sound so very interesting at first, but who quickly find that visualizing the workload means adding it to that never-to-do list.
The “Reader” feature in Safari 5 is as much a game changer for me as Instapaper was when I first discovered it. I switched back from Chrome because of this feature.
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