Instapaper 3 is out
Best.app.on.my.iPhone. Period. So Instapaper 3 is out on iOS, which makes the app a whole lot more social and collaborative. What Instapaper does is that it allows you to save articles to it, after which it takes out all colours, (most) pictures, and side-bars, so you can focus on what really matters. If it wasn’t competing with my eBooks, I’d just end up reading the amazing wealth of free information that people manage to publish for us everyday.
Instapaper 3 brings a slightly updated look — ‘starring’ has changed to ‘liking’ for instance — and integration with Facebook, Twitter, and your whole shebang. One thing I noticed is that I have no Facebook friends that use Instapaper, just Twitter ones. But that’s ok, Twitter is cooler than Facebook.
And one thing I’m missing big-time, is some kind of search. Ever since Delicious left the web in terms of relevance, somewhat replaced by sending links to Twitter, I’ve been using Instapaper to collect those stories I’d like to read at some point. Somewhat the point of the app, I gather. But the consequence is that I only really read the top 5 stories that I saved, because those are the ones that appear on my iPhone screen without scrolling down (the cost of linear interfaces). And when I leave an article that I was reading to check on something, I never know where to find it again. This is a design-issue, Marco Arment, developer of the app, is big on design, so I’m sure he’ll figure this out.
Correction: I just figured out that you can scroll up to see the search box. D’oh!!
For the rest, you’ll never have a better reading experience where reading online articles is concerned. And all thanks to Instapaper. Thanks Marco!
You can check out Instapaper online at Instapaper.com, but it’s really best consumed through either your iPhone or iPad. If you follow me on Twitter, you can check out what articles I ‘liked.’ 
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The whole "process this later" just revolutionized my reading workflow. In similar vein, Huffduffer does the same for audio (pushing stuff for listening later as a podcast). It's just great.
Instapaper really takes the real-time out of Web 2.0 and lets me read stuff when I have time for it. I'm constantly amazed how "small" the idea behind the service is and how everything is in the great execution and seamless interfaces to other services – my main user interface for Instapaper is actually Google Reader.
Some time ago at the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society's Garage development get-together, a team of guys built a middleware for Instapaper and Facebook (I forget the name), which basically listed what your friends were reading. While using a other website to read links that you don't have time right now was a bit silly, the core idea was good and I was super happy that the same feature is now in Instapaper. Then again, the whole point of Instapaper was to save stuff you don't have time now so browsing for more stuff isn't really helping =)
I'm quite sure you do have friends who use Instapaper on Facebook, but they just haven't realized the new feature and that the links between FB and Instapaper need to be activated first. The Twitter folk might just be the early adopters. I'm not missing search, because the use case of using Instapaper to find "great stuff to read" is relatively foreign to me. But I'm sure that that use case will be more frequent now with Instapaper's social features.
I mean search in the sense of searching your existing content. At this moment, I have over 100 pages saved in Instapaper, which makes for a long list. And it's hard to tell which article you came from when you leave it to check for something else (like what your friends liked). So sometimes I end up searching for the last article I was reading for several minutes…
My reading comprehension sucks. But yeah, that sucks.
[...] playing this other game largely relying on tilting, only days after intensively getting into Instapaper 3 reading. It’s called Dark Nebula 2 and belongs in the class of tilt-based games like [...]