sunnuntai 6. tammikuuta 2013

Pocket (formerly Read It Later)

Some time ago I realized I have a problem that I often find interesting articles online that I don't have the time to read at the moment. Then I just leave them open on my browser, and suddenly there are 50 tabs open in it -- not to mention having the same problem on the browser of my smartphone as well (if only with less tabs). And if the browser crashes, I might lose all the open tabs for good.

Pocket (formerly Read It Later) is a web site / application that is designed to solve the problem of stashing interesting articles to be read later. Stashing an article from your browser couldn't be simpler: it's just a click of a single button (for Opera, Firefox, Chrome). There are also versions of Pocket for Android and iOS that allow you to update and, equally importantly, to read the articles you have stashed before. Pocket formats the stored articles nicely, stripping out all non-essential content such as advertisements and navigation links, showing you just the main text.

Right now my Pocket seems to contain about two dozen articles, including these:
I don't know if these are any good, but when I came across them they looked interesting enough to warrant reading (or watching) later. I get the links from friends or from Reddit or Twitter, or from any other source. Note that as demonstrated above, you can also stash videos and images into Pocket, so it's better than Pinterest that only allows you to save pages with images. ;) However, you cannot share the contents of your Pocket with others, which some may consider to be a minor drawback.