If you ever tried to explain Instapaper (or any other read-later app) to a “straight” (non-nerd) friend or family member, you’ll know why Apple added a reading list to Safari. Even without the terrible experience of adding a javascript bookmarklet to Mobile Safari, Instapaper requires way too many steps: save page; remember to open Instapaper before the internet goes off to load that saved page; remember to read.
Safari, on the other hand, just saves the page inside Safari. That’s it.
And so Amazon is now simplifying Instapaper’s Send to Kindle feature, allowing you to send a web page to your Kindle with one click.
Send to Kindle is implemented by website developers, so the button will be found in the sea of Twitter, +1 and other crap on every page, ever. The trick is that pretty much everyone is logged into their Amazon account all the time, even if they don’t know it. Just press the button and – next time you open your Kindle – the article is there. This is clearly how it should be done, and could actually be the biggest rival to Instapaper since the likes of Pocket.
And of course, Amazon will be very happy with all the free analytic info you’re throwing its way. Hell, maybe it can even make use of it, unlike Google which clearly didn’t know how to make anything of the incredibly fine-grained like/dislike mechanism that was Google Reader.
Hell, maybe we’ll get better book recommendations because of it.
The new button is available to developers right now, and is already in use on Boing Boing, Time and the Washington Post. There’s even a WordPress plugin available, so you can probably look forward to us adding it to Cult of Mac and making our groaning pages load even slower.
Source: Kindle Post US
