Readability and Instapaper  

Anil Dash runs down his thoughts on Readability and Instapaper.

The heart of it for me is this paragraph, in which Dash makes a case that there is room for both services:

Because if we succeed in vilifying Readability for trying to figure out a publisher payment model, Instapaper is going to go down with it for charging for its app. If we succeed in attacking Instapaper for providing ad-free views of content within its app, Readability is going to go down with it.

I agree with the fact that there is always room for competition, which generally creates better products all around and good things for the consumer. The problem with this particular idea for me is that no one will ever see an article in Instapaper without having seen it in its regular ‘web’ form. By contrast, Readability does collect a portion of a subscription fee whether a publisher knows that it is doing it or not.

It’s a question of transparency, which is the problem so many people have with what Readability is doing when it gathers payments on behalf of publishers without their permission or knowledge.

There is more to the puzzle though, and the whole article is worth a read if you’re interested in this sort of thing. The paragraph that I quoted above is taken out of context, but I don’t believe that its intent has been altered.

Update: As some folks have pointed out to me, if you’re using Instapaper integration in an app like Tweetbot, you never see the original page.