I time-shift a lot of my web consumption via services like Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, ShowYou and even Youtube's watch it later feature. What are your favorite services? What do you love about them? What features are missing?

my favorite service is still Instapaper. This is partially for historical reasons because I've been using it the longest and because I think it has generally made good improvements over the lifetime of the app. I love the pagination feature and the latest fonts that have been added. It's a great reading experience.

I wish the experience was more visual a la Pocket. Every article or post these days has at least 1 image attached to it and reading apps should use these images to enhance the reading experience. Additionally, I think that Instapaper no longer has the best parser in this category. The reality is that content formatting on the web is constantly changing and requires a lot of work to keep up with those changes.

The feature I'd really like is a smart queue. It's great to have a simple list of what I've saved in reverse chronological order. But the app should be smart and keep track of my reading habits. It can re prioritize certain articles based on my previous behavior or just purge my queue automatically if I haven't read the posts in over a month or two. Of course all this has to be done in a smart way and with feedback to the user.

I love the idea of a smart queue. A few other things I want:

1) Every reading app should have an implementation of Paperboy

2) Folders or Playlists or some better way to sort, store and organize content.

3) Sort by length. Sometimes I only have 5 free minutes and I don't want to start on an epic read, just a snack.

Sorting by length would be great. I like that idea a lot.

Totally agree length is a great way to sort.

One of the other things I've been toying with is the relevance of an article from a time perspective. Some things are really only interesting for the 6-12 hours of publishing, some are evergreen. I like thinking of it as the half life of the content.

The freshness of content is a great idea. I would love to explore time from a different angle...

Chris seems to like reading articles about X in the morning, articles about Y in the evening and long articles on the weekends.

i wonder why none of these services have done anything at all resembling these smart queue features. do you think they're still at the growth, trying to get mass adoption for the 'read later' concept or is it something else?

Also the differences between commute, work break, lunch, and weekend reading habits are very different.

The Songza Concierge + Instapaper Time-shifting becomes very powerful.

The Songza Concierge is a great example.

@ozlubling I don't know why we haven't seen experimentation or differentiation from those services but the success of the Songza Concierge could help nudge them.

What about the the clean aggregated reading experiences? i.e. Pulse, FlipBoard, Google Current. Should they be separate and focused on discover and recommendation, while time-shifted reading should be on efficiency and filtering?

I like the separation personally. Apps that are simpler and more focused tend to work better. Flipboard is great at discovery, but will never be a dedicated reading experience.

Most of the time im using pocket and actually more uhm... yea.. left open tabs in chrome or safari. Now, that theres possible to access them from any device, its the easiest way to access content for me. I like it simple.

I recently thought about a browser concept, where tabs are aligned on the side instead on top and tabs are treated more like a browsing history. That has many benefits imo.

interestingly enough, I find it both easy and difficult to switch between different read later experiences.

It's easy to save a bunch of articles to a new read later app and create an instant queue. What's difficult is that if you use these apps a lot you get used to every little nuance of them. It all gets embedded in your muscle memory. Then when you start using a new one, the reading experience suddenly feels different.

Instapaper to Kindle has changed my life. Now it's just "read it later" and by 9am the next day I have my reading material.

The major frustration with instapaper and other apps of this sort is the inability to actively sync that stuff in app.

I just got a nexus 7 which I love, but I'm always forgetting to sync instapaper, and so, on the subway, i find myself articleless...

@polarity I love the new features of Chrome and Safari that let you pick up your tabs on any device. Not as much when I have a weak or worse no network connection.

Also one of my biggest pet peeves across many web publishers is how poorly their content is formatted on mobile devices. Readability/Pocket/Instapaper really takes the cake there.

@SandesrAK I just got a Nexus 7 too, which I love as a reading device. Have you seen the "paperboy" feature of News.Me and now Instapaper that downloads all your content as soon as you leave home and/or the office? It is fantastic (and I'm not sure if its on the Android version).

niemanlab.org

oooh, I did NOT see that. but that sounds perfect.

i think that this "paperboy" location hack is the only way that this issue will be resolved on iOS in the near future. But on Android, there isn't that limitation. So these apps could easily have a background process to download new content every x minutes.

ps - i love the idea of content being quietly sync'd to your device before you go on your commute - for us at backspac.es i know it's an idea we've thrown around, but iOS makes it really hard.

@sandersAK you have to tie it to a geo fence

Pocket on the Nexus 7 is pretty great. As soon as you save any content you are viewing on the Nexus 7 it immediately pulls it down in the background. I haven't actually noticed if its otherwise sync'ing things in the background like @ozlubling suggests.

@ccarella - are you pocket > instapaper? i haven't played with Pocket since the name change, but am definitely not married to Instapaper.

I switched to Pocket when I got the Nexus 7 because I found it the most beautiful and best reading experience on it.

It also does a nice job saving videos and other media which I don't really care about on my iPhone but love on my tablet.

What about Readability?

I've tried to switch to pocket but couldn't do it. I ready this stuff mainly on the iphone and Instapaper still has a better font and better pagination support.

@wrmayo I love Readability and think its the most beautiful of the iOS apps. I had sync'ing issues with it. I'm willing to call it user error combined with short attention span for getting apps to work the way I want.

i also find readability a bit too minimal in its functionality to my liking.

I think all that Time shifted web content is a normal evolution of the web : we know there are so many and many content who are created all day, and we are just human : we need tools for use all theses content, theses tool are like Readability (for exemple).

@wrmayo, how do you feel about your own question: should discovery/recommendations be separate from time-shifting?

do others agree with @ozlubling when he writes: "Flipboard is great at discovery, but will never be a dedicated reading experience."

Obviously many of these services integrate with time-shifting services and Apple is doing its best to bring the entire solution into Safari with Reading List. Focus is key at the onset but as use becomes widespread, I'd think both experiences would come together through acquisition, discover/recommenders or time-shifters moving into each other's space, and/or new platforms built with both in mind.

Pocket and Readability are both top of the line apps with great capabilities to read content at leisure on all media types i.e. smartphones tablets and commonly used browsers on desktops.
It's easy to search content and get to it for later read avoiding all clutter It will be great to see contents being automatically indexed on the basis of time it has been sitting there without being read!
If any content that was marked for ReadItLater, and was never read; does not need to be there forever. How about marking those articles as "Too Late to read!" and auto-archiving them out.