Bookmark Overload
I started with Instapaper like many people do. It was harmless: I saw something online I wanted to read later, hit a link in my browser toolbar and voila, I could open up Instapaper on my iPhone later and read it. Then came the integrations with twitter clients and other apps. Great! Now there’s even more stuff for me to read!
And then came the competitors.
Not happy with just making web pages easier to read, Readability added its own reading list. And then Read Later got tired of being an also ran, changed its name to Pocket and added some whiz bang UI and extra features to its own service. Like a sucker I signed up for all of it and have found ways to send links to all these services simultaneously (with ifttt of course).
So what happens to all those pages after I’ve read them? Surely they should be archived and searchable for all time. So those links also go into Pinboard and Kippt. Why two bookmarking services? Because the former is widely supported by third party apps and the latter is pretty, that’s why. Plus even though I’m liking Kippt a little more I don’t quite trust it as much as Pinboard because I don’t have to pay for it. Funny how that works.
So now I have a problem on my hands: three read it later services and two social bookmarking services with all the same links. Do I use all of them? Sadly the answer is yes. I don’t want to give up on any of the features that all this great software provides, from the groovy iPhone app for Kippt (called Clippt just to confuse us) to the awesome Instapaper Beyond web extension.
Too many great tech products. Not such a bad problem to have.