Avatar
I'm Drew Breunig and I obsess about technology, media, language, and culture. I live in New York, studied anthropology, and work in advertising technology.

These are reactions to things I feel are important.

Follow me on Twitter.

Instapaper Pro 2.0 released! 

marco:

This is big.

This is big. I’ve been a fan of Instapaper for awhile. I believe it was the first app I paid for. If you own an iPhone I strongly suggest you go buy the full version and install the bookmarklet in your browser. It’ll change your day. More than that, this version stands to change the publishing world at large.

A post yesterday on the NY Times’ Gadgetwise suggested that the future of reading is on smartphones, not because of their superior reading experience but because of their ubiquity. The Kindle, no matter how well they sell, cannot hope to pry entrepreneurs away from the 40 million strong install base of iPhones and iTouch devices.

Enter Instapaper 2.0. The simple, powerful design of his software is guaranteed to turn the heads of Jeff Bezos and publishers alike. By deftly managing existing XML feeds, Marco has bettered the Kindle in many ways by giving users the ability to subscribe to items being read by others and online magazine portals.

But after a few minutes of playing with Instapaper 2.0, I thought to myself: “This is going to be shut down.” It’s too perfect, both offending publishers by swiping their content and by easily solving the current offline-to-online awkwardness that’s now in the process of burying them.

Marco, I wish you the best. Your software is flawless, but it could easily be to the written word what Napster was to music: something that changes the entire industry by making geeky behavior (optimizing RSS feeds in this case) into something easily mastered by anyone with an iPhone. I pray it doesn’t get shut down by the very industry it enables.

* For those unfamiliar with Instapaper: it’s a solution for bookmarking and reading online, written content from a variety of devices. By clicking a “Read Later” button in your browser, the text from the page is stripped of it’s images, graphics, design, and (notably) ads and saved for your streamlined consumption. Words cannot convey the elegant simplicity of the app. Just go get it and sign up.

Source: instapaper

53 notesShowHide

  1. dbreunig reblogged this from marco and added:
    I’ve been a fan of Instapaper for awhile. I believe it was the first app I paid for. If you own an iPhone I strongly...
  2. powerllama reblogged this from instapaper and added:
    feature is so awesome. Makes...so much more social
  3. michaellynton reblogged this from marco and added:
    I saw the other day that Instapaper Pro was on sale. This definitely peeked my interest into buying the Pro version...
  4. unabridgedhaiku reblogged this from marco and added:
    It definitely is. Instapaper...the app I use the most on my phone, and the one I’ve gotten...
  5. do-nothing reblogged this from instapaper
  6. spytap reblogged this from instapaper and added:
    without question my most-used application. It’s also...only one that I would consider
  7. benjaminstein reblogged this from marco and added:
    New Instapaper iPhone app. New Tumblr iPhone app. Happy Marco iPhone Day!
  8. var-contriv reblogged this from instapaper and added:
    Apps and these look like important changes.
  9. rhodyram reblogged this from marco and added:
    I use this app everyday so this
  10. marco reblogged this from instapaper
  11. iamdanw reblogged this from instapaper
  12. instapaper posted this