Short Helps You Find Quick Reads in Your Saved Article Queues
A new reading app for busy people crossed my desk yesterday. It’s called Short, and according to TechCrunch it is intended to save readers from the morass of articles which they’ve saved to Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, and Reading Pack:
A new app called Short from Enric Enrich, a developer at Todoist, and his friend Alex Muench aims to parse your endless queue of saved articles into something a little more manageable. Using popular services like Pocket or Instapaper that users are already working with to build up a list of reading material, Short sifts through saved items to bring out articles that require 10 minutes or less reading time, so a user can pick out a 2 minute read while they wait in line at Starbucks, for instance, or a 5 minute piece if they’ve got a few minutes to spare before a friend arrives at a lunch meeting.
Another good name for it would be Redundant.
Short is being pitched based on a feature which existing save for later apps already have. Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability can all help you find the shortest reads among the articles you have saved. To be clear, Pocket has this feature hidden under the highlights section, while the other two services let you sort all saved articles by length, but they all have a similar feature.
And all 3 of those services offer this feature in their Android apps; Short is only available on iOS.
Just about the only unique thing that Short does is to split articles into categories based on an estimated reading time (< 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes). That could prove useful, but it’s also not revolutionary or disruptive. It’s simply a new way to address a solved problem.
You can find the app in iTunes.
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