Why Instapaper 3.0 and Pinboard are my new favourite things
Since I last outlined my information workflow back in January 2010 things hadn’t changed much during the past 12 months.
But with the launch of Instapaper 3.0 I’ve finally been moved to ditch Read it Later and adopt Instapaper as my main tool for saving articles to read at a more convenient time.
Why? These reasons:
- You can now follow other users and see what other Instapaper readers are reading
- The sharing options have improved dramatically
- There’s a great deal of Instapaper support from iPhone and iPad apps
- The Instapaper iPad app is awesome
This also coincides with my recent switch from Delicious to Pinboard as my cloud bookmarking service of choice.
This was partly because of the news that Delicious might be closed down or sold, itself a result of woeful underinvestment by current owners Yahoo.
But once I discovered Pinboard as an alternative (thanks to @chrisphin) I found the slicker integration with other content sharing services and social platforms made it a no-brainer.
For example, you can set Pinboard to automatically bookmark links that you tweet, articles that you share on Google Reader, and posts you save on Read it Later and Instapaper, among others. This kind of integration between sharing and discovery services is a beautiful thing and makes organising the world’s information sooo much easier.
So two lessons learned:
- A ‘social layer’ always makes things better
- Opening up your platform and integrating with other apps and services around the web is a great strategy
I would love to hear about your information workflows online, with these services or any others, so please feel free to leave thoughts or observations in the comments.