Read It Later Hints At New Direction with Web App Release

Read It Later, which raised more than $2.5M in July in its first outside funding round, released a new web app to give its users a clearer way to consume content and appreciate media on the Internet.

UPDATE: "The previous list view, though efficient, didn't give the content a chance to really shine," Read It Later founder Nate Weiner told LAUNCH via email. "A lot of wonderful, interesting and beautiful content gets saved into user's lists and we wanted to ensure that each of those items could stand out and been seen."

Read It Later's new web app saves and organizes your future reads, videos and images into a tiled display with controls to sort saved media by article, video or photo.

"We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can create the best experience for consuming all the great content you discover across the web," wrote Nate on the company's blog.

The web app design is the first of what the company says will be many new projects coming to the platform. 

The new UI is designed to make it easy for users to find the content that appeals to them most at any given time. Read It Later has also added a favorites feature and the ability to bulk edit content to move it to archive, delete, favorite or tag.  

Nate founded the San Francisco-based company in August 2007. Since then, the company has grown to six employees and more than 3.5M people have used the service to save more than 100M articles.

Pressure from competition will force companies who want to compete in this space to constantly innovate and update their services for their members.

Nate tells LAUNCH Read It Later stands out where its competition doesn't because it supports all types of content and is available on every major browser and mobile device. 

Instapaper founder Marco Arment and Read It Later competitor, told LAUNCH via email that he believed that the market for saving media content to read later would continue to crowd with more and more companies venturing into the arena.

Earlier this week, Spool, a similar company, launched its beta at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

Read It Later investors include Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures, Founder Collective and Google Ventures.

SCREENSHOTS

The filter function allows you to sort your saved content by article, video or image. 

Read It Later's batch edit function makes it easier to clear out content you no longer want to keep. You can also tag an item for later or make it a favorite.

CONTACTS

Read It Later
Website: http://readitlaterlist.com/
Blog: http://readitlaterlist.com/blog/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/readitlater
Twitter: @ReadItLater

Instapaper
Website: http://www.instapaper.com/
Blog: http://blog.instapaper.com/
Twitter: @instapaper

Spool
Website: https://getspool.com/
Twitter: @getspool

Nate Weiner
Twitter: @IdeaShower
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nateweiner

Marco Arment
Twitter: @MarcoArment