Nostrich

The Web Without the Muck: A Long Interview with Longform.org

The $4.99 app is simple, elegant, and attractive—all prerequisites, if you’re promising readers a more serene reading experience. What sets it apart from the other reading apps is the way it fetches a supply of long-form articles from the chosen publications, so users don’t have to. With apps like Instapaper, by contrast, you do the curating yourself: if you find an article on the Web that you want to read later, you click on a special Instapaper bookmarklet in your browser, and it shows up in the app. But before you can do that, of course, you have to get the bookmarklet from Instapaper’s website. That’s two steps too many for most readers, according to Lammer. “I know that to the tech press this sounds ridiculous,” Lammer says, “but Instapaper is too complicated for some people to use. We wanted to create something that … works more directly.”

Later:

We had this idea for something that took advantage of what we liked about the Readability and Instapaper experiences and did that in a way that doesn’t involve going to the Web and shifting stuff back, but instead putting stuff in a central place where you could always find good stuff to read.

Nobody in the tech press has ever tapped “Editors” in Instapaper, apparently.