Introducing Read It Later Digest

Digest is Read It Later with a brain. It analyzes all of the articles in your list and automatically groups them into topics. Simply put, it is like having folders in your list, but RIL takes care of sorting them for you.

This is all about reinventing the reading list.  RIL makes it very easy to save a link with just one click, in any browser and on most mobile devices.  It’s almost too easy.  So naturally your reading list can fill up fast.

There is a fundamental problem with displaying your items in a list.  It’s hard to know where to start.  Do you start from the top?  From the bottom?  Randomly?  None of these make a whole lot of sense because the order in which you saved things is not necessarily the order you want to read them.

Looking at your list, you may have an article about technology you wanted to read, a video about kittens you wanted to watch, a link to shoes you wanted to buy or a website for a band your friend told you to check out.  And when you finally get around to reading, you may only be interested in one of those topics.  It’d be a LOT easier if it were better organized.

Normally organization is accomplished with folders and tagging.  But both of those take time to manually add to each item, time that you do not have, which is the whole reason why you are using Read It Later in the first place!

This is why Digest works.  It’s smart enough to know the difference between an article on iPhones and an article about sports.  It takes each article and filters it into the topics you care about automatically.

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Landing on the front page is like coming to a news site where all of the articles were hand picked by you, where there is nothing to filter through, it is all content you already know you want to read.

Topics are automatically created for you based on what you’ve already saved but you can fully customize your digest by adding topics, removing them, rearranging them and even defining your own custom topics that articles will be sorted into.

Digest finds and highlights certain content from your list. If you save a lot of videos, Digest will present them together for you. If you save a lot of links from a certain site, Digest will group them for you.

You can even share your digest by making it public and sending the URL to all of your friends.

How to Get It

Today, Digest is available as a free invite only beta.  To request an invite, go to http://getpocket.com/digest

The Future

Digest is starting on the web but will very soon be making a native appearance within the iPhone app, Firefox extension and the upcoming iPad app.

The current way you use Read It Later and all that it offers will not change and it will absolutely still be free.  Digest will be the premium upgrade to the Read It Later service and pricing will be announced in a few weeks.

I’m unbelievably excited about where Digest will go in the future.  I already have a million ideas for paths to explore, so grab an invite, give it a spin and enjoy a new way to use Read It Later!