Temporary bookmarks for the masses

Read it later claims a million users. XKCD knows why:

Read it later is a service for temporary bookmarks. On seeing something you might want to read, Read it later’s nicely-crafted bookmarklet, iPhone app and Firefox extension lets you save an item to read with one click. They then show up your reading list, which can be viewed in Firefox, online or in the free and pro iPhone app. Very nifty. Instapaper is an alternative that others are happy with.

The Read it later pane in Firefox

My only question is, why hasn’t Delicious begun offering this kind of service? To_read has been a popular tag at Delicious since it launched in 2003 (I’ll bet it was popular on Muxway too). In November 2008, Delicious turned five and had more than 180 million URLs (and many, many more bookmarks) under its belt. I can’t help but wonder whether those numbers would have been five times larger if Delicious had offered a dead-simple to_read option in their bookmarklets and browser plugins. Such bookmarklets have been requested and some have been independently crafted, but Delicious is about ’s not an easily discoverable option.

It's not due to inbox zero, I tell you.

Delicious describes itself as “a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source“.

Less abstract language is at work over at Read it later:

• Save pages from your computer or phone
• Read at home, work, on the plane, or during your commute; even without an internet connection (emphasis theirs)
• When you are done, bookmark the page on any number of popular services or just discard

So, while the Delicious team was busy improving social bookmarking (will they ever adopt comma-separation for tags?) someone else realized that very many people also had a slightly different (manage temporary bookmarks), yet vitally different (find a way to read this stuff later) need than Delicious has been able to provide.

When you just want to close the window but remember the bookmark, Read it later does a great job. Entering “Save mode” (alt+m) lets you quickly skim through a page and mark links for future reading by clicking on them. When faced with mountains of tabs and piles of interesting links, taking RIL out of its scabbard is the fastest route to liberty. Until Delicious becomes equally effortless for linkpileshredding (yes, I just made that up), I’m stuck with using two services rather than one, and most likely, so are you.