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Ivan Petkov

An article’s "life" on the internet is bright and short. Most often, its existence starts on the homepage of the website, on which it is initially published and then, it enjoys the attention of readers, it is shared in social networks and possibly, it is quoted and cited as a source of information by other authors and other media. Actuality of information is very important and it determines the degree to which the users like the articles. An actual article is more interesting but the interest in it declines faster when the successive articles cover it. It is gradually forgotten and remains in the archives.

In the process of avalanche information dumping, we often do not have time to pay attention to articles that would otherwise be of interest to us. A large number of users see the title of an interesting article and think that they will read it later but then, they forget where they saw it or do not think about it all. Here comes the help of the services that promise us that they will carefully save the interesting article for the time when we are free and able to pay the necessary attention to it. Pocket, formerly known as Read it later, is one of the most popular services that saves contents for later viewing.

In addition to the scenario previously mentioned, Pocket can be useful when the user carries out research and collects information from multiple sources in it. It may be of use to pupils, students, journalists and many people with different professions, interests or in different situations. The convenience and the reliability of the service are ensured by its cloud nature, which allows various types of devices such as personal computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones to read the saved articles.

A personal computer can access Pocket, using the extensions (add-on) for the most popular and modern browsers - Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari. In Firefox, once the extension (add-on) is installed, a small button appears in the address bar of the browser, which saves the article with just one click. It’s convenient, isn’t it?

The articles you save in this way are displayed in a convenient menu, which is hidden behind a button that is similar to the first one:

Unfortunately, there is no extension for the users of Internet Explorer and the service remains available through the browser:

Of course, Pocket has not ignored the extremely rapidly growing interest in mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. The application is available for iPhone, iPad and Android.

The mobile version of Pocket comes with a built-in browser that allows convenient viewing of saved articles without leaving the application.

It is an interesting question as to how much Pocket extends the active life of an article. Most recently, the company has added the statistics option to be used by the websites that generate the content, which Pocket users save. According to the data shared in the company's blog, 8.5 million users benefit from the service. The website Nieman Journalism Lab carried out an experiment to find out how this customer base affects the life of an article. The results are interesting:

Photo: Nieman Journalism Lab

The graph shows that almost half of the 331 users, i.e. 159 users, who had saved the article read it within the next 6 days. In comparison, the specific article was shared 310 times on Facebook, 716 times on Twitter and only 47 times on Google +. We note that the data are valid for a specific audience of a specific website and for a specific article, but we cannot but agree that the results are quite good.

What are the alternatives to Pocket? There are some with their own merits. I will mention two of the most popular ones: Instapaper and Readability.

Both services offer the option to save materials for later and to access them via mobile devices through mobile applications. Readability offers the option of viewing the article in the browser, but free of any graphical elements, mostly banners, that can be very distracting or irritating. Both services offer export to Kindle, which could be used rather creatively when it comes to quite voluminous online resources that contain mainly text. Reading them sitting comfortably in the armchair would be a pleasure.