Instapaper highlights4/7/2023 ![]() People save - it’s not articles, it’s Amazon URLs, and daily deals sites, and not really anything you could actually read." So the Betaworks team is focused on extending and improving that experience - Donohue mentions a Fast Company article that calls Stitcher "the Instapaper for audio," and makes clear that he'd much rather Instapaper be the Instapaper for audio. Some save magazine stories to read later, while others are "just bookmarking. "There are basically two main use cases for Instapaper," Donohue says. Highlights turns Instapaper into a much better, more organized research and reading tool, but the team has wider aspirations. "Things like highlighting," he says, "and doing annotations - that’s something that’s a ways away on the mobile web." Instapaper can offer it for every site on the web in a cleaner, simpler, centralized way. But as the web has become cleaner, simpler, and more responsive, Donohue and his team have had to find other ways to improve upon the experience. In 2007, "the mobile web" was barely a concept, and most websites were ugly and unreadable on small screens. ![]() Instapaper's role in its users' lives has changed drastically over the last few years. (Instapaper's long had small bits of social-networking features, but Donohue says that's about to become a much bigger focus.) Eventually, Donohue says, you'll be able to take notes alongside the highlights, or send them straight to your friends. You can also choose to automatically tweet what you highlight, or send it to Evernote or Tumblr. When you select a passage in Instapaper, it automatically goes to your Highlights folder, a running list of everything you've stored. "It’s really incredible to me that there’s been no save-for-later app that has implemented highlights somehow." It's a big competitive advantage for Instapaper over an app like Pocket, which has become the go-to app for simply reading things later. Virtually every book-reading service, from Amazon to Oyster, offers a way to store and share highlights - Instapaper's system works basically the same way, and Donohue can't believe his luck that none of its more direct competitors had done it yet. Donohue leads the Instapaper team at Betaworks, and says Highlights has been in the works basically since it acquired Instapaper. The best new feature is Highlights, the familiar yellow-pen markup, which Brian Donohue tells me is long overdue. Things as simple as dragging and dropping items between folders are finally present the web app now serves as the primary organizational tool for Instapaper. The website, largely forgotten since Arment switched his focus to building mobile apps, has been completely redone. There's a new, simplified icon, a two-paned view that is more useful and more consistent across platforms, and a slightly more cartoonishly friendly interface. Instapaper 5.2 is, on one hand, a visual overhaul of the service's existing features. Last fall the service got a new life at Digg and Dots owner Betaworks, which today took the first step in turning Instapaper into something much more ambitious than a read-it-later app. But over the last seven years it's evolved into a full-featured app that de-clutters the internet and makes everything a little more pleasant to read. Instapaper began as a solution to a single, simple problem: developer Marco Arment couldn't find anything to read on the train, so he built a website that stored links for him to come back to later.
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