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Tumblr developer Marco Arment has, in his spare time, created two very useful Web services on his own. The first is Instapaper; it's for saving links to Web articles that you want to read at some point, but don't have time read right this moment. It's like Del.icio.us or other bookmarking tools, but without all the features you'll never use. You click a "Read Later" button in your browser's bookmark toolbar and a window pops up to tell you that — phew — the article has been "Saved!" Later, you can go to Instapaper.com, login, and find all your articles piled up. I've discovered Instapaper is best used as a way of pretending that you're actually going to read a very long article on Chinese politics or Emily Gould's essay on oversharing.

This use case bears out in Arment's second service, Givemesomethingtoread.com, which lists the stories most often saved by Instapaper users. Today's top headlines include "Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality" on ReadWriteWeb and "50 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do: Marc and Angel Hack Life," making it the Web's version of that pile of New Yorkers on the coffee table.