I read a lot of nonfiction on the web. And I like to find good articles, read them, share them, and save them.
You’d think there would be a good service out there that helps me do all those things. Actually, as I’ve written about before, things are a bit clunky. Usually it takes several apps to achieve a good reading flow.
That’s why I’m happy to try out ReadingPack, a service that organizes what you’re reading online and helps you discover new articles you may enjoy. In short, ReadingPack is a social reading list.
Here’s how it works: If you find an article that you want to read later, you can share it to your “pack.” For those of you who use Pocket, that’s the Pocket part of ReadingPack.
Then, if you really like the article and want to save it, you can designate it a “must read.” This moves the article to your “shared list,” which others can see if they’re following you. For the very few of you who use Scoop.it (or used to use Snip.it, my all-time favorite), that’s the Scoop.it part of ReadingPack.
Which gets me to the best part of ReadingPack. You can follow people whose articles you like. And then those articles arrive in your “feed.” This is news discovery part of ReadingPack, and it’s a bit like Zite (which is going out of business soon) and a bit like Twitter (with a keener focus on articles).
So far I’m liking ReadingPack, and I’m excited to try it out with my students. I’m pretty sure they’ll like that ReadingPack offers saving and sharing and following all in one place.
Because ReadingPack is new, not everything is perfect yet. For example, I don’t like that long headlines are cut off (this was also a problem with Bundlr and Annotary). And I’d like to put my articles into collections (the founder said this feature is coming) and have the option to follow people’s collections (rather than the people themselves). (Yes, I loved Snip.it.) And the phone app (at least the Android version) doesn’t always work. But those are small things, and there are improvements coming out every day. I’m excited to see what founder Yuval Shoshan does with ReadingPack.
If you’re tired of the articles you find on Facebook, or you’re finding that your Twitter feed is a bit crowded, or if you’d like to save your articles in an organized way where others can read them, you should try out ReadingPack. If you do, let me know what you think!