I am very excited to announce that Read It Later has come to the iPhone and iPod Touch and is now available in the App Store. » Get the Details
Read It Later is a great tool for saving things to read later, but now it’s great for helping you actually READ those pages too! By sorting your list by PostRank (from AideRss), you can quickly find what’s worth a read and start with your best content first.
If you use Google Reader to manage your RSS feeds, you’ll now find the familiar Read It Later checkmark right next to the Google Reader star. You can now save directly to your reading list from Google Reader!
Now you can take full advantage of all the features of Read It Later without the UI bloat. Almost all of Read It Later’s components can be hidden and/or customized to your liking. You can use all of the provided elements or even run Read It Later from a single 10×10 icon in the location bar.
New Appearance Options:
Read It Later isn’t just for Firefox anymore. You can manage your list online at readitlaterlist.com and use the provided bookmarklets to maintain Read It Later’s core functionality regardless of the browser you have. So if you have Firefox at home, Internet Explorer at work and an Iphone in between, you won’t have any problem keeping your list up to date.
It’s your data. It’s that simple. You can now delete individual items from Read It Later’s online storage or even wipe your entire account. And of course if you don’t want any of your list saved online you can still disable the online access and Read It Later will only save locally.
Additionally, you may now password protect your RSS feed to ensure privacy while still taking advantage of the online features.
A new syncing system has been implemented to provide stability and ensure your list stays up to date no matter how many computers you have. Updated sync options and setup gives you easier control over your sync setup.
You can now have Read It Later automatically save an offline copy of every page you add to your list. And the new Offline Cache Manager will allow you to control/view what has been saved.
On August 2nd 2007, just over a year ago, I walked through a little tutorial on how to make a Firefox Extension. It was that night I started working on an idea of mine, Read It Later.
I ‘released’ Read It Later a few days later on the 6th. I say ‘released’ because all I did was send it to a few friends and put an entry for it on my website, which was getting about 6 hits a day.
I had never expected Read It Later to reach even 1/4 of what it has. It was created to help me keep track of articles that I wanted to read but couldn’t while I was at work. However, during fall of last year, Lifehacker, MakeUseOf, and DownloadSquad picked up on the add-on.
Since then Read It Later’s user base as been growing strong.
But during this past year, I’ve learned one very important thing about application development: listen to your users. Luckily, my users talk a LOT. I mean there are over 700 comments on the Read It Later project page. There are so many it’s almost unmanageable (working on a new solution for this, look out in Sept). You guys have provided some amazing feedback and suggestions and without it, Read It Later would be nothing.
The first version of Read It Later was two (obscenely large) buttons with limited functionality and control. Over the past year I worked hard with users to make it better. Because of all of the user feedback and suggestions, I was able to release Read It Later for Firefox 3, which was a huge improvement from the original version. I’m honored today that Mozilla Labs has awarded Read It Later as a Best Updated Add-on in the Extend Firefox 3 Competition.
So this is thanks to all of you who have emailed me, left comments, submitted translations, answered questions, beta tested, and worked with me one on one resolving bugs. Read It Later couldn’t have done it without you!
As you can see (by the users listed below who made each implemented suggestion), I take user suggestions very seriously.
If you have an idea on how to improve Read It Later (big or small), please let me know!
Online Access - Manage your list online, in any browser or mobile device. In Safari, Internet Explorer, or an iPhone. Click the ‘Access Anywhere’ link at the top of your reading list for more.
Search - The tag dropdown has been replaced with a search-as-you-type field. It will search through the titles, urls, and tags of the items in your Reading List.
Suggested By: Zeke, Praveen
Auto-Syncing - For those of you who forgot to sync your reading list before heading home after work, now you won’t have to. If you are using sync, Read It Later will automatically sync your list in the background after starting up and every few hours afterwards.
Suggested By: bds, James, Rob, How to Geek
Improved Options screen - The options dialog got a revamp and brings better organization to your preferences.
Unread Items Counter - View the number of items in your reading list.
Suggested By: the non hacker, rayphua
Auto Mark as Read - You can now set Read It Later to mark pages as read after opening them.
Suggested By: Wayne, the non hacker, Sergio Santos
Auto Tags - Set custom tags to be added to every page you save.
Suggested By: Raydancer, Ken
Click to Save Button - An optional button can be added to your status bar to activate Click to Save Mode without a keyboard shortcut.
Suggested By: Wayne, Todd
Custom Keyboard Shortcuts - You can now customize your keyboard shortcuts to any combo you like, not just ALT.
Suggested By: Mike Harris
Read Offline Improvements - When you are offline, items that have not been saved for offline viewing will appear dimmed out.
Suggested By: Praveen
Empty Titles - Pages without titles will be replaced with their url.
Suggested By: Dan Gale Rosen
More Languages - With help of the translation team (made up entirely of Read It Later users), Read It Later is continuing to be localized in more and more languages. Want to help?
Read It Later will officially be striped of it’s Beta suffix after one more big set of updates. I’m very excited for what I’ve got planned in the coming update, it will take Read It Later full circle.
The new version of Read It Later with Firefox 3 support is now available!
Read It Later has been completely revamped and hosts a whole new bundle of features including built-in RSS feeds, syncing, offline reading, tagging, multi-language support and more.
You can read all about the new features and get a fresh copy on Read It Later’s project page.
Here is the original demo updated to show the new improvements.
The newest version of Read It Later is all thanks to you. The feedback I’ve received has been nothing short of phenomenal. Almost of the new features have come directly from the comments and emails I’ve received from the community. It would not be what it is without you, so keep it up!
The new version of Read It Later has support for multiple languages (with some more I haven’t added into the install yet). The translations were done generously by Read It Later users from around the globe. What can I say, Read It Later users are simply awesome.
Thanks to the translators:
As some of you may or may not know, one of The Planet’s datacenters had a transformer explode, knocking out power to thousands of servers and websites.
The Idea Shower’s servers were among the lucky bunch.
I’ve moved the site onto a temporary server but some sites may be slow and may not be fully function until tomorrow.
Stay tuned.
A few weeks ago, High Society, a ski/snowboard company I’ve worked with over the years suffered a hard loss: we lost one of our team riders to a cliff drop that went tragically wrong.
Out of respect for his family, I will not be mentioning his real name here because I don’t want this post to appear in the search results for his name. For the sake of the article I’m referring to him by the name ‘Tim’.
During the resulting media coverage I noticed a trend that caught my attention.
The day after his death, the opening sentence of an article from the Rocky Mountain News read:
“Aspen native and snowboarder [Tim} liked spinners, bonks and card tricks, according to one of his sponsors’ Web sites.”
That website was ours. And that line ’spinners, bonks, and card tricks’ was taken off of his profile page, which was the first page you’d find after Googling his name.
But here’s the thing. There was a lot more to Tim than ’spinners and bonks’. He was a well respected rider and someone who had accomplished great things in his short life. But you would not know this from the article.
It struck me that journalists are turning more and more to the web and social networks to dig up information about people for their stories. It’s obvious that the author simply Google’d Tim’s name and took out the first bit of information he could find, no matter how trivial.
If you recall the Elliot Spitzer scandal, you may remember the same thing happened in that instance as well. When the identity of Spitzer’s lady friend was discovered, media organizations were quoting her Myspace page and printing photos straight out of her profile.
Now, is that really fair? Or more importantly, is that really journalism? It seems that more journalists, in the effort to be the first to the press, are skipping the interviews of friends and families and turning more to finding out what they can on the web.
The reason I ask if it’s fair: How many of you would like to have your legacy defined by what’s in your Facebook profile?
Take a look at the image on the right. It’s an excerpt from my Facebook profile. Like most of my friends profiles, it’s not exactly on the serious side.
I would hate to think that if I passed away tomorrow that the world would know me by:
“Minneapolis resident and programmer, Nate Weiner liked Rickrolling himself…”
And Tim’s profile on the High Society website? It wasn’t serious. It didn’t mention the things that really defined him. None of the items that were listed there did his legacy any justice.
But why should it? Should we be worried that if we put up a joke that others will take that as our character definition? Or should we expect journalists to be more conscious of the type of content they are sourcing from?
If this is going to be the way it is, should we avoid joking around and keep our content strict?
I would certainly hope not, but it begs the question, if people were to write about you today and used to the web to research you, what would they find? And more importantly, would you want others to read it?
I’ve made some new updates to the recently launched Twitter tool Intwition.
Story Titles
The first update was the biggest request: To resolve page titles, rather than just showing urls in the popular lists. If you peek at the homepage and New Item Finder you’ll see this now in action.
Stories That Come to You
Second, you can now have items that reach ‘popular’ status sent to you via Twitter. Just follow @Intwition and whenever a new story crops up, it’ll show up in your public timeline.
Also note you can also subscribe to the RSS for popular items.
Better Spam Filtering
With anything of this nature, spam happens. I’ve been tuning the algorithm to remove this from appearing on the home page and I’ve been having some good success. There is still one big part I need to add to it, but you should not see much spam on the front page for now.
As always, your suggestions are greatly appreciated!
Are you fluent in a second language outside of English?
I’m looking for volunteers to help translate about 100 words/phrases for the upcoming Read It Later release. This is one of the most demanded features for the new version and I want offer everyone the same ease of use, no matter where they are in the world.
If you are able and would like to help out, please drop me a line via email or in the comments below.
Thanks!
Update: I’ve added Read It Later to BabelZilla so that it’s MUCH easier to translate and manage translations. If you’d like to join Read It Later’s translation team, check out Read It Later on BabelZilla.
I just signed up for FriendFeed to see what all the hubbub was about and figured this is a good time to mention how to connect with me outside of this site.
I’m always trying to network, so if you Add/Follow/Subscribe to me and I’ll add you back.
FriendFeed - http://friendfeed.com/ideashower
Twitter - http://twitter.com/IdeaShower
LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/in/nateweiner
Digg - http://digg.com/users/Twister47
Mixx - http://www.mixx.com/users/twister47
StumbleUpon - http://twister47.stumbleupon.com/
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