On Pocket
Now that I’ve detailed the dumpster fire that is my photo management situation (I kind of think of it as the room in my data house that would be on Hoarders), I have been wanting to talk about reading flow, which in what I might term the “evolved smartphone” era turns out for me to be one of the more critical aspects to managing information and devices.
I started using Pocket (formerly Read It Later, as they always seem to inform you) shortly after joining the tablet family last year. The idea was that I would app-ify just about all of my reading, with Reason magazine via Play Magazines (it’s now called Play Newsstand and is a typical Google rewrite/repackage/merge trainwreck in version 1), books via Kindle, and articles via Pocket. This has worked fantastically.
Pocket seems like a nonsense app when you first see it: it just print-formats articles from the web and syncs them to the reader app at startup. You “add to Pocket” articles via bookmarklet in Chrome, a Chrome add-in (my method at work), or using the Share button in an Android app.
Pocket worked great for me routing articles from Chrome (on both Android and PC), but I really didn’t feel its full power until I started using IFTTT for automated queuing and Twitter for manual discovery. I have an IFTTT rule, for example, for any articles added to Mark Steyn’s RSS feed on National Review Online. When they show up there, IFTTT queues them in Pocket with an ifttt tag so I know where they came from.
Twitter is pretty much a link sharing site now with a chatty overlay, and even the clunky official client has a long-press-then-short-press route to the Share menu in Android, so I can quickly queue articles that are interesting to me. This is of course augmented by manual adds via Chrome when I hit an article that’s too long to read at the moment.
In addition to being a fantastic way to gather offline reading in a nice format, Pocket also maintains reading history, which can be handy for the “I recall reading that, but I don’t remember where” moments.
A lot of effective smartphone usage comes from app-ifying clunky activities and staying away from the browser as much as possible. Getting the Twitter to Pocket connection allows for that much easier than hitting an aggregator like RealClearTechnology via Android Chrome and reading the old fashioned way. My bigger goal now is to broaden my IFTTT rule set to include more of the authors from whom I want to read everything.