This is perfect. By far my biggest complaint about Instapaper is that I can't find enough content to save to it — anything shorter than a few thousand words feels too insignificant to save for later.
A couple suggestions: I think the front page could be two to three times as long. Also, the "Read Later" button doesn't feel very button-y. My first thought was "Why does every article have a bookmarklet for me to drag to my toolbar?" It would probably be better as a link. Lastly, could the word "Instapaper" and the fact of the site's integration with it be more prominent? I had to hover over a Read Later button to figure out what would happen when I clicked it. (I suspected that it would save to Instapaper, but that's largely because of the aforementioned bookmarklet-ish look.)
I second ihodes' sentiment that this is not far from being something I'd pay for.
Edit: on second thought, I'd only multiply the number of articles per page by 1.5–2.
Perhaps a simple tagging/categories mechanism, crowd-sourced or by the editors. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a certain type of article, and having the simple recommendation that it's of the "US/National/Politics" genre is enough to make me hit "Read Later" when I otherwise wouldn't.
A nice layout, as well. Kudos!
Also, were it to be extensively curated and organized, perhaps with 1 sentence blurbs about the articles, and frequently updated, I'd pay a nominal fee for it, if that's a direction you'd be interested in going with it.
It depends completely on the quality of curating, but yes I agree. I feel like I've been looking for something of this nature. Reading long articles won't hurt my shortening attention span, I hope.
I like this since I tend to enjoy more in depth treatments of interesting subjects. I would suggest that you place an RSS link in a more prominent location than buried in the FAQ section. Also, it would be nice if you could embed the link to the original story in the RSS feed, even just appended to the description. I'm sure I am in the minority here but I do not own any Apple mobile device so RSS is more important to me than Instapaper.
Interesting coincidence... I just went to a talk by MIT professor Sherry Turkle where she mentioned that publishers were questioning if the 'longform' of her book (~17,000 words I think) could actually sell. Her answer was that the only way to adequately deal with the complex issues she addressed was in this format.
17,000 words is not a long book? was that supposed to be 170,000? Or just in the sense that she wrote a long article and is trying to pass it off as a book?
I haven't used instapaper before, so I might be missing something. But I just signed up for instapaper, then clicked on one of the "read later" buttons on the longform page. This took me to a registration page for instapaper, which nonetheless recognized that I was logged in to the email address I'd given it.
A couple suggestions: I think the front page could be two to three times as long. Also, the "Read Later" button doesn't feel very button-y. My first thought was "Why does every article have a bookmarklet for me to drag to my toolbar?" It would probably be better as a link. Lastly, could the word "Instapaper" and the fact of the site's integration with it be more prominent? I had to hover over a Read Later button to figure out what would happen when I clicked it. (I suspected that it would save to Instapaper, but that's largely because of the aforementioned bookmarklet-ish look.)
I second ihodes' sentiment that this is not far from being something I'd pay for.
Edit: on second thought, I'd only multiply the number of articles per page by 1.5–2.