InstaRank v1.0

I realize in my last two articles, Instapaper 5 — in which I made a number of proposals for Instapaper 5 — and Betaworks Releases Instapaper 5 — in which I conveyed my mostly positive feelings on the new release — I likely appeared very critical of Betaworks and their continued work on Instapaper. This is not the case: while I do feel a better launch strategy entailing a service-wide design overhaul and one in which they added a larger set of new features to Instapaper would have greatly helped the platform, I am not of the opinion that Betaworks did not improve the app in Instapaper 5; the impressive new InstaRank feature is a prime example of this.

That said though, I cannot help but feel that this feature, too, would have benefited from some additional development time. I may — and the blog post linked earlier confirms this suspicion — be an outlier in that I prefer to keep my Instapaper queue small, in the four to eight article range, and read in chronological order. This is a roundabout way to say that I will find little use in Instapaper’s new Popularity sorting algorithm, but not that I could not at some point in the future: a section similar to The Feature — available under “Browse” on the iPhone — populated with articles ranked using the InstaRank algorithm through which I could find and save articles to my queue for consumption at a later date would be very useful indeed.