A few days ago Apple opened its WWDC with a keynote showcasing some of the news in iOS 5, OS X Lion and the semi-new service iCloud. One of the features that was announced was Safari Reading List, a special bookmarks folder inside Safari where you can save pages for later reading. This is more or less in direct competition to one of my very favorite iOS apps; Instapaper.

If you by any chance haven’t heard of Instapaper, here is a quick explanation. Instapaper let’s you save articles from the web to a list of things to read later. You can do all your reading for free on instapaper.com, or you can buy (for $5 i think) the iOS app that also downloads the articles you saved so you can read them offline (perfect for people like me who chose the WiFi iPad).

I could go on and on about the greatness of Instapaper because it’s an app and service that is absolutely essential to the way I browse content on the web, but I won’t. There’s however one more thing I have to explain about Instapaper before I get to the point of this post and that is the way you get articles to Instapaper. Thera are a few different ways to do this. The most important ones (according to me, off course) is:

• Copy a URL and when you open the app it will ask if you want to add that url to your read later list.
• Use a bookmarklet in your browser to send your current page to the read later list.
• Use Instapaper’s API.

Safari Reader uses more or less the same approach as the second point. Though not a bookmarklet it will be a special menu alternative inside Safari. The first item in my list is not really something that the user of Safari Reading List will miss since it is not necessary because Reading List is inside Safari. You do not interact with another app.

For some people this might replace the functionality of Instapaper. Marco Arment, the creator of the Instapaper software and the owner of Instapaper LLC (and also the host of the brilliant 5by5 podcast Build and Analyze) has commented on it, both in his blog (link to Marco’s blog post), in his podcast (link the the episode ”Circling Birds”) and in some other tech related news. He brings up a lot of valid arguments why Safari Reading List might actually prove to strengthen his business. However I think he misses one very important feature where Instapaper will likely kick Reading Lists ass; The API.

The Simple Instapaper API allows third-party applications to add URLs to Instapaper.

And a lot of third-party applications on iOS and OS X does this. As far as I know every respectable RSS-reader or Twitter-client (again on iOS and OS X) is integrated with Instapaper via the API. Whenever you stumble upon an article in you RSS-feed that is too long to read right now, just send it to Instapaper. When you browse you Twitter-stream and find a link to an article but haven’t got time to follow the link, send it to Instapaper. Especially for twitter this is great for me since I usually check my twitter-feed when I’m on the go or have a few minutes break. It’s enough time to see what’s new, but not to do any quality reading. (Yes, I know that by now I’m starting to sound like an Instapaper commercial.)

So that’s that. Quite a lot of text to make a small point; Instapaper’s API is it’s best feature compared to Safari’s Reading List, for me and probably for a lot of other geeks.