Someone told me that the average time spent on a web page is seven seconds, that includes looking at all ads, photos and reading content. To be honest, I probably belive this statement to be true. There are some exceptions though, some articles I want to read later, in detail, but not right now. This is even truer when the evening rolls around and I’m on instant messenger and friends send me links, or when checking silly things friends send me via email.
There are countless social networking solutions to help you tag sites to visit later, the biggest is probably del.icio.us, followed by Digg, but these tools, along with countless others available are designed for you the user to share the content with someone else. What if you don’t want to share the content, you simply want to access a particular website again without the pain of sending yourself an email or book marking a site in your browser to forget about it later.

My solution for the last two weeks has been Instapaper. Instapaper is a bookmark applet; you add their icon to the bookmark toolbar of your browser and when on a site you want to read later, click it. The applet will then save the link and a short description to your Instapaper site to be viewed and clicked on later. One of the best parts of this service, besides being free, you don’t need to give an email address to create a username! I did create a username and password since I use it at work from time to time when browsing websites on my lunch hour, my Macbook and when at friends houses to retrieve sites that I know I saved there.

There are a lot of really neat details about Instapaper as well, including the ability to use this on your iPhone. Read the FAQ to use the service better, faster and be more productive.

Oh yea, did I mention that it’s free? There aren’t even any ads on the site!

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