Do people send you links for which you have no time to read? Surely, at some point you do find the time to get to them, but without a means to save those links, you’ll have to go find them again. Enter the realm of “Reader” apps. At the top of the food chain are Read It Later (RIL), and Instapaper (IP). There are others out there, but I’ve done the hard work for you; you only want one of these two.

I began using RIL around the middle of last year based on a recommendation from a coworker. He’s apparently friendly with the creator of it. I did a short bit of research and jumped right in. It worked and I was happy.

A few months ago, I became aware of tech writer, Marco Arment, who also happens to be the creator of IP. After following his blog religiously and agreeing with his thoughts on most everything, I assumed his product had to be superior to RIL.

A month ago, I made the transition to IP. Today, I made the transition back to RIL. In this case, an outstanding person does not make the most outstanding product. It’s good, sure, but not as good.

Why I went back:

• Chrome integration. Marco more or less ignores browsers other than Safari. The RIL devs may also, but third parties have done a heck of a better job creating tools for their product than for IP. I spent a few hours trying all the IP extensions and was happy with none of them. I ended up with two buttons on my toolbar to get the functionality out of IP that I had been getting via one (Orbvious Interest) with RIL.
• Page rendering. Of the first handful of pages I attempted to read inside IP, half rendered incorrectly. I was forced to visit the actual pages of the articles, which turns my reader into a bookmarker. If I was offline, which is a strong use-case for these applications, I’d be without a paddle.
• App design. I never felt comfortable in IP [IMAGE]. It is more feature-rich than RIL, but more features isn’t always necessarily better. RIL is simple and works beautifully [IMAGE], which is the pinnacle of design IMO.

When using RIL, I’d add and read multiple articles per week. That made transition to IP a bit of a headache since I had so much data stored, but luckily, I only added a single article to IP over the past month, which was a breeze to migrate over to RIL. Sure, I’ve had a heck of a month with a wedding on the horizon, but I think it’s more indicative of my lack of love for the product than anything else.

I’ll continue to read what Marco has to say because he’s a heck of a writer, but I’ll be doing that reading in Read It Later.