Read It Later celebrates its third birthday today. I released the first version on August 6th, 2007. (To see the history from 2007-2009, check out this post from last year).
This past year has been incredible. Last November I quit doing all contract development and begun focusing solely on trying to make Read It Later a full-time job.
Since then:
- RIL’s userbase has doubled to over 3 million users.
- Users saved an additional 40 million articles to their reading lists.
- iPhone users spent a combined 100 years reading content within Read It Later.
Going full-time allowed me to focus on three major products that I have released within the past year:
- Read It Later 2.0, released in December, was a redesign of the entire service.
- Digest, released into beta this past spring, reinvented the reading list, making it easier than ever to organize your list and (ahem) digest it.
- RIL for iPad, released this past June, was an entirely new way to interact with your reading list.
The next year is going to be entirely focused on taking the existing product lineup and supercharging it. I’m working on making everything you do within Read It Later easier, faster, and more streamlined. The mindset I took when I created Digest was to eliminate the one extra step it took to organize your list. I’m still in the same frame of mind and I plan to keep whittling away at all the barriers that separate you from reading your list.
Thank you for your amazing and continued support over the past 3 years. Your notes, emails, reviews, tweets, and comments have made the work I’ve put in completely worth it.