Making the web useful no 47265 - plain text
Good friend and fellow Rebooter Peter Rukavina asked me to write about Instapaper, as I was raving on about it when we had our annual meetup in Copenhagen.
I thought it a difficult thing to write about, other than providing a link, and a one line explanation - it stores web pages for later reading.
Literally that's all Instapaper does. So far, so delicious et al. But that's where the comparison ends. First, there isn't any tagging involved with Instapaper, just a simple 'I'm letting myself get distracted, I'll save this for later' bookmarklet.
Secondly, what the Instapaper does so brilliantly, is convert overstuffed webpages to that highly readable format, plain text. A bookmarklet grabs the current web page I'm reading (invariably I seek out the single page, print version) and 'saves it for later'. So, when you eventually login to Instapaper, you have a pile of saved articles waiting for you.
Here's where the service really comes into it's own - you have the ability to look at a beautifully rendered plain text version, without the visual clutter of those pesky, blinking, revenue generating ads (fwiw, I often choose to visit ads, particularly on the print/single page versions offered by websites, to encourage these views).
By the way, another tool worth mentioning at this point is the excellent 'Readability', a bookmarklet that converts a web page into a quiet, plain text version sans ads. I often use Readability to read pages, in deference to Instapaper.
I suppose both Instapaper and Readability raise an interesting business model for online writing; pay to have less on a page - not just less ads, but less everything. Interestingly, some sites have made efforts to block the javascript techniques that Readability uses to 'clean' its pages - perhaps those sites would benefit from thinking about why people are using such techniques (cf. the business model in the previous paragraph).
And I haven't even got around to mentioning Instapaper's rather lovely iPhone app yet. Peter's a die hard Nokian, so he'll have to make do with accessing the plain text versions (as I did on my e61), which is still a hugely useful experience on a small screen device.
But the iPhone app takes Instapaper to another level. After Mail and Safari it is the most used app on my phone.
It takes your 'read later' articles queue from the instapaper website and downloads beautifully rendered plain text versions to your iPhone. With an optional night time mode with tilt/rotate prevention. So you can read at night. It's such a brilliantly simple idea, superbly executed.
Other use cases: commuting without cell coverage. Plane rides. Bus stops. You get the idea.
The usability of this app all flows from it's deep support for plain text versions of text. I find the more I create and consume text, the less abstraction I want from that text. You know, like a book presents text. Less distraction, less noise, more reading.
The ultimate manifestation of this approach is naturally the book, so the circle was completed I suppose, when a bright spark decided to publish a bunch of their Instapapered plain text articles into a physical book.
I really liked that idea, so I asked a few friends if they fancied doing the same - ploughing through my 'to read later' list and each selecting a few articles. Which we did. And we also used Lulu to (privately, because we didn't want to breach copyright) publish the book, which came out rather nicely (more photos):
The irony of taking what was often a print publication's electronic edition of an article, pushing it through a service that converted it to plain text and then printing a physical edition of that book isn't lost on me.
But novelty aside, the ability to curate, with friends, a set of articles, was a great experience.
The latest changes to the Instapaper website and in particular, the iPhone app, have been focused around curation: starred items, folders, and being able to access other user's saved articles.
So, there you go, Peter - the blog post on Instapaper :-)
_UPDATE: I forgot to mention http://blog.newspaperclub.co.uk - it's a venture setup by some nifty Brits; they've created a business from the blog–newspaper idea they had last last year._
It's interesting as it uses the low costs of spare newsprint capacity to create, well, newspapers from curated web content.
