Pocket Improves Sharing And Highlighting

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My favorite read-later app, Pocket, has revamped its sharing options to make it way easier to send articles and snippets to other people. It’s powered by email, although once you’ve set it up you wouldn’t know it. And yes, for those who have been following along, it totally lets you save your favorite passages as highlights, although you’ll need to hack things to get that working.

There are a few new elements here. First is the new sharing menu, which lets you push an article off to your service of choice (just like before), and also automatically includes one-tap shortcuts for people you mail often.

The next part is an inbox, which – combined with push notifications – lets you see anything your friends have shared with you.

But the best par is the sharing itself. Now, you can highlight a section and hit the share popover menu. Choose email. The first time you send to a contact you’ll have to pick then from your contacts list, but after that they get their own button. You can add a comment and then you’re done – the e-mail will be sent.

I checked right away to see if the other sharing options had been improved. If, for instance, Evernote sharing now included the selected snippet of text and not just the whole article. The answer is no, but that’s OK.

If you send the article to yourself, you can either have you mail client file mails from shares@getpocket.com (Gmail can add a label). Or even better, you could use Internet Glue™ service IFTTT to file them for you adding your snippets to a dropbox folder, for instance. or to your Evernote.

I’m going to experiment with this, but I really like that the Pocket folks have used e-mail to drive sharing. This is, they say, because twice as many people already use e-mail to share than any other method.

Already got Pocket? The update is free and already live. Not got it? It’s still free!

Source: Pocket Blog

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